Mike Curtiss (5
May 2012)
"Media Alters Evidence
of Trayvon Martin's Criminality for Obama's Political Gain"
Dear Doves,
We are hard pressed to explain why the assembled elite media has
found the motivation to dredge up
racial politics to obfuscate the illegitimate Obama Regime.
Whats in it for them? Are they progressive communists
that support the transformation of this country to communism?
Are they merely playing a part in the drama of social
activism? Do we even know why 90% of our countrymen follow a
twisted perverted path that seeks to destroy the
American dream?
I wish somebody would speak up to answer these important
questions. We have these so called journalists
career ending crimes? A MSNBC producer doctoring 911 tapes to
make sure they incite racial hatred. There have been at
least two committing black on white murders attributed to
invective related to Trayvon. It's not likely to end soon. It's
time we start stacking bodies where they belong; 1600 Penn Ave
Washington DC
Agape,
Mike Curtiss
Media botches Trayvon Martin coverage
by Gene Lyons
Almost from the beginning, there were two aspects of the George
Zimmerman as racist assassin story that made little sense.
First, who calls the police, then murders a total stranger in
cold blood knowing that they're minutes away? Panic seemed
likelier than malice. Second, how does a 28-year-old man with a
desk job catch a fleeing 17 year-old high school athlete anyway?
I say almost, because like most Americans, I responded to the
Trayvon Martin tragedy as President Obama did — in sorrow, and
with pity for the immense dignity of the young man's parents.
They and their son deserve justice. Not vengeance, justice.
I also believed, as I've written, that "untrained individuals
like Zimmerman have no business packing heat, nor confronting
strangers they deem suspicious. Trouble didn't come to George
Zimmerman; he went looking for it. At minimum, he acted like a
damn fool."
However, I was also leery of journalists and TV personalities
like Al Sharpton and his MSNBC colleagues setting up as
prosecutor, judge and jury. Even if you didn't know about
Sharpton's previous misadventures — he became famous due to his
outrageous conduct during the 1987 Tawana Brawley rape hoax —
the network's permitting him to report about a public event in
which he'd enrolled as an active participant violated every
known rule of journalistic ethics.
But truly, I had no idea. What began as a local tragedy has been
supersized into a ratings-driven national TV melodrama, a
racially- and politically-charged infotainment pitting good
against evil. A festival of bad reporting, speculation and
mind-reading from the outset, the Zimmerman-Martin affair has
turned into a classic example of what University of Virginia
psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls a "consensual hallucination."
That is, people have so much emotion invested in the story, that
regardless of how much the facts change, their conclusions
rarely do. With group identity at stake, skepticism's in short
supply. It's become like a national Rorschach Test. Comment
lines to newspaper stories and blog posts regarding the case are
a sight to see. Responding to a New York Times photo of
Zimmerman on the witness stand, readers speculated that he'd
artificially darkened his skin to curry favor with
African-American jurors.
More's the pity, because apart from its most basic elements,
i.e. that George Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin during
a struggle after phoning Sanford, Fla., police to report a
suspicious character, very little about the tragedy as initially
reported has survived closer scrutiny. Remember when Zimmerman
was depicted as a 250-pound brute assaulting a child half his
size? The real George Zimmerman turns out to be a smallish
fellow some five or six inches shorter than the wiry young man
he confronted.
Cable TV's amateur prosecutors expressed outrage that Sanford
police failed to investigate. They alleged that Zimmerman had
been allowed to leave the crime scene and go home. Supposedly,
police hadn't bothered to take photos documenting Zimmerman's
self-defense claim, nor collected his gun or clothing as
evidence. Sharpton and the rest railed about poor Trayvon's body
lying four days in the morgue before his frantic parents were
notified.
If true, these would have been evidence of callous racism and
worse. However, they were all categorically false. The cops took
Zimmerman downtown, grilled him for hours, collected the
physical evidence, canvassed for witnesses and filed an
affidavit recommending he be charged with manslaughter. Sanford
officers delivered the terrible news to Trayvon's father face to
face almost as soon as the family phoned police seeking his
whereabouts.
Needless to say, no corrections were forthcoming. Instead fresh
outrage was manufactured over murky video footage of Zimmerman
being led into police headquarters in handcuffs, seemingly
unmarked after being treated by EMS technicians. For MSNBC
viewers, the footage became as familiar as the Zapruder film of
JFK's assassination. Not only the Rev. Sharpton, but Big Ed,
Lawrence O'Donnell and their guests repeatedly portrayed it as
the linchpin of their case. Zimmerman had clearly lied about
Trayvon assaulting him. Therefore there was no self-defense.
Case closed.
So when ABC News published a contemporaneous photo of Zimmerman
with blood streaming from two wounds on the back of his head on
the day of his bail hearing, a naïve observer might have
imagined that an attitude adjustment might be in order. No
chance. Sharpton ignored the photos altogether; the rest gave
them short shrift.
So maybe Zimmerman's a racist murderer, maybe his suspicions of
Trayvon were correct, or possibly something in between.
Based on what I know, I can't say.
Then there was this disconcerting admission from the AP's
account of the hearing: "Investigator Dale Gilbreath testified
that he does not know whether Martin or Zimmerman threw the
first punch and that there is no evidence to disprove
Zimmerman's contention he was walking back to his vehicle when
confronted by Martin."
And if he doesn't know, dear reader, neither do you