By Dylan Skriloff
Warning Graphic Image
We’ve seen it before; the mass media hyping up a small story into a national sensation.
Sensationalism is part of the business, after all, and anybody in the media lives off of ratings or web hits or print circulation. Eyeballs and eardrums, however you break it down.
This here New York-area weekly newspaper editor writing in Clash Daily for the first time, cannot remember the last time a serious story outed as a media-generated fraud has had so much staying power as the Trayvon Martin case.
The real national news story is that there is no national news story but that which the media itself invented. The rabbit hole goes deeper because the media repeatedly got caught inventing the story, but still managed to sell it!
It started with the initial reports; white guy George Zimmerman, white male George Zimmerman, white white white Zimmerman Zimmerman Zimmerman, killed an innocent black youth and due to racism or some other nebulous force, nothing had been done about it. In an election year with the whitest-looking man ever, Mitt Romney, running against the first black president, Barack Obama, the dog whistle ears immediately perked.
Then we saw Zimmerman. The white man wasn’t even white. He had a “white” name, but his appearance clearly drew from his Hispanic mother.
Though the census sometimes categorizes Hispanics as whites, the news media never does. Not until the Trayvon Martin story when it invented for itself the new term “white hispanic” on the fly. Everyone was in on it from the NY Times to NBC to Oprah.
In news media land, Hispanics and blacks had generally been grouped together as ”minorities”; but that is flexible, we have learned. If it helps play into a story-line that white injustice is omnipresent, Hispanics that are clearly mestizo in appearance, will now pass as white as long as it is useful to the editors.
Oh, I’m waiting for someone to say he’s not hispanic cause he’s half-white. Tell that to the president. Zimmerman says he’s hispanic and that’s what most Americans would respond to him as being.
So, the first lie of the media was to send out the initial story that the man who killed Trayvon Martin was white. This basic profile got everyone riled up, but it wasn’t even true.
Not too many Americans were deterred from believing the white vs. black angle of the story, however, by the fact Zimmerman’s not white. Mere details. He was already chosen by God to play the role of “evil white” in this psychodrama and gosh darn-it if some small detail, such as the basic premise of the story being detached from reality, would be allowed to get in the way.
This is the mass media and they make Hollywood look realistic, so just back off and let’s live out this make believe drama!
So now, after Zimmerman, the hispanic, is chosen to play the role of evil white in this play, the pressure cooker’s dial is raising a bit, and media personality Al Sharpton is just the man to come into the picture, barking. We know his routine and it’s all the same everytime.
Sharpton, a media man with his own TV show, succeeded in multiplying the audience of the drama and brought part of his following to a fearsome rage. While Sharpton is busy working his magick on the ground in Sanford, Florida, the news media is cooking up reports backing up the racial angle and the idea that Trayvon suffered a total miscarriage of justice.
But many of the pieces of information the mass media used to get people’s buttons pushed, turned out to not only be wrong, but to be blatantly doctored to the point of being nearly criminally false. Inciting a riot is legitimately a crime and this is what the news media seemed to be taking it upon itself to do so.
Initial reports that stoked the fury of the masses said Zimmerman was never even taken in for questioning. Of course, that turned out to be a lie. He was taken in in handcuffs, as a matter of fact, as video shows. How many other lies were there? Can we count them all? Needless to say, if the story was initially reported consistent with what the facts bore out, it wouldn’t have been much of a sensation.
One of the key lies that stoked the embers of racial tension was when NBC released a tape of Zimmerman saying, ”This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black,” for seemingly no reason other than to profile a black kid as a potential criminal. However, the alleged news stations (we probably should call them propaganda stations), conveniently deleted out several seconds of audio which showed the operator had asked the race of the youth, so police could identify him.
Oh, just a small detail. He answered a question, for crying out loud, he didn’t smear the kid with a racial insult!
Then WABC puts out a video it claims showed Zimmerman suffered no damage to his head or face in the fight with Trayvon. Only problem is, instead of looking for wounds, they were hoping not to see any. As we know from police footage, Zimmerman did have a busted nose, lacerations on the back of his head and blood spilling out of him.
It wasn’t tremendous physical damage done to him in the fight, but it wouldn’t have been fun to be on the receiving end of those blows either. But alas, the experts at WABC couldn’t be bothered to get an accurate look at his head, anxious instead to see what they wanted.
Then there’s the trick of showing the pre-teen photo of the victim to stoke empathy, while making the “bad guy” look, well, bad. It’s just a show like any TV or movie.
The bigger story that Trayvon vs. Zimmerman provides, is the inexcusable and unethical practices of our national news media.
It does seem following the vast number of inaccurate reports disseminated during and after the Boston bombings and the Newtown massacre, there is some growing awareness that working in this field of media we journalists should try to, you know, get the facts at least mostly straight, before running with a story.
As much as the Internet has grown and we try to deny the power of TV and the big networks and newspapers to ourselves, we’re lying if we can’t admit, for the biggest stories that really move the world, the old establishment news media still has us in their grip. Even when we know they’re advancing an agenda, it’s hard to break free 100 percent.
The mass media drives story-lines that end up creating our political destiny, and we follow even when we know the stories aren’t really legit. Once they inflame emotions, their job is already done.
It’s like we’re in an abusive relationship with the lying news media, making excuses for them. If you are a media critic, you are not exempt. More people must be stubborn when we learn a story is bull.
Kick the habit! You didn’t feel that. The media made it happen.
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