Is George Zimmerman guilty of murdering Trayvon Martin? I don’t know, and neither does anybody else. That hasn’t stopped Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson from waving ropes and demanding that Florida build a gallows.
It’s an all-too-familiar pattern of events and reportage. Something terrible happens involving a minority person caught up in violent tragedy — usually with law enforcement — and it’s quickly presented as another white racist killing.
There follow organized protests, demands for prosecution, new curbs on the police, pandering politicians, new government programs to aid minority communities, and so forth.
Thus, outrage exploded across the nation two weeks ago when national media reports fixed the predictable narrative of the innocent Martin being shot dead Feb. 26 by Zimmerman, a self-appointed Neighborhood Watch vigilante, because the black teen was wearing a hoodie and “acting suspiciously.”
Sharpton quickly flew to Florida to organize protest rallies and there proclaim that “we came for permanent justice. Arrest Zimmerman now! That’s what this rally is about.”
Not to be outdone, Jackson also headed to Florida and declared, “Trayvon is a martyr. He’s not coming back, he’s a martyr, murdered and martyred. Now we must illuminate the darkness with the light that comes from the martyr.”
But anybody looking for more light on this case had to wait days before the national media bothered to look beyond the politically correct narrative and get the rest of the story.
As so often happens with these episodes, the rest of the story differed dramatically from the initial version. For starters, it turned out Zimmerman is Hispanic, not white. The neighborhood where Martin was killed is racially mixed, not particularly upscale, and “gated” only in a very loose sense.
Next, we learned that there was a physical altercation in which multiple witnesses saw Martin — who was several inches taller — on top of Zimmerman. Afterward, police said Zimmerman had grass stains on his back and some bloody cuts and scrapes.
It also turns out Martin wasn’t quite the choir boy, having been suspended from school three times and implicated in defacing school property, fooling around with marijuana, and possessing diamond rings and other expensive jewelry for which he couldn’t account. Then came the Martin tweets, replete with the “F” and “B” words.
All of which raises a question about the journalists covering this story — why did it take weeks for somebody to start doing the basic kind of reporting required to complete the portraits of Martin and Zimmerman?
The first suspect to look at is the instant narrative taught in a thousand college classrooms for the past several decades, in which white racism is the preferred explanation for everything that is wrong with American society.
The stereotypes born of such absolutist thinking make it all but impossible to distinguish between instances when white racism really is the problem and when it isn’t, especially when journalists who are supposed to be skeptical of everything and everybody until proven otherwise don’t ask the obvious questions.
Can any racially tinged incident be fairly and accurately reported by traditional media? Former Newsweek reporter Bill McGowan described this problem in detail in his 2001 book, “Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism.”
He observed that among the most serious consequences of politically correct thinking in the newsroom is the profession’s lack of credibility with the public. “Much of the American public has the sense that news organizations have a view of reality at odds with their own and that their reporting and commentary come from kind of parallel universe,” he wrote.
Sadly, the flight of readers from traditional newspapers and broadcast news to the Internet, talk radio,and cable TV news has not changed the predictable course of reporting of incidents like the death of Trayvon Martin. If anything, things have only grown worse in the decade since McGowan wrote those words.
UPDATE: More Martin tweets
The Daily Caller has unnearthed a second Twitter handle used by Trayvon Martin. It includes a photo in which Martin is giving viewers a one-finger salute.
Among the messages tweeted under the handle T33ZY TAUGHT M3 was this one: “Plzz shoot da #mf dat lied 2 u!”
For more on this from DC, go here.
Mark Tapscott is executive editor of The Washington Examiner.
