Yesterday I mentioned the three groups most responsible for ramping up the racist angle in the Zimmerman-Martin case. The Florida prosecutors and the perpetually aggrieved, self-identified civil rights activists who are still living in the middle of the twentieth century were two of them. I believe, though, that the third group—the mainstream news media—was the catalyst for all the trumped-up drama we’ve witnessed.
Right from the start, the media played this tragedy as a racial thing, as if this one incident were a snapshot of the current state of race relations in America. Forget that most violence against blacks is committed by other blacks; forget that Chicago and other cities have a violence epidemic in black communities that has nothing to do with racism; ignore all the progress that has been made over the last fifty years; look past the fact that the president of the United States and his attorney general are both black (unless, of course, you consider Obama a “white black” due to his parentage—in the same manner as the media attempted to portray George Zimmerman as a “white Hispanic).
Once the media created the initial uproar, the governor of Florida felt the pressure to appoint a special prosecutor. That may have been the first mistake. The second mistake was the prosecutor herself, Angela Corey, who seemed to love a microphone and deemed it her duty to emphasize a racial component.
Such is the state of a nation living under the reign of political correctness.
Meanwhile, the perpetually aggrieved activists, emboldened by their media allies, and with the help of an administration that also lives in the 1960s, staged massive protests, demanding Zimmerman’s head, convinced he was guilty of murder before all the facts were examined. Never mind that Trayvon Martin was no longer the youth of the pictures on our TV screens; don’t mention his fascination with drugs and guns; pass over his troubles at school; instead, make him into an innocent symbol of racial hatred against minorities.
Again, all this was perpetuated by the media.
In one particularly dishonest incident, NBC doctored a recording of Zimmerman’s statement to the police that made him sound like a racist. Zimmerman’s lawyers are now proceeding with a lawsuit against that network.
Once the trial began, there was no other news worth reporting:
As the testimony in the trial continued—nonstop coverage on all cable channels—some uncomfortable facts came out. One witness who was talking with Martin by phone at the time of the attack admitted he was the one to insert race into the incident, referring to Zimmerman with a racial slur. Talk about an inconvenient truth. It also seemed as if some of the prosecution’s witnesses were helping the defense more than the prosecution. The narrative was not going as planned. What could they do?
Now that it’s all over, it seems it’s not all over at all. Anger and resentment are coming to the forefront. The administration is seeking to use a “hate crime” allegation to put Zimmerman back on trial at the federal level. The concept of a hate crime is a tautology. Most crime has hatred connected to it. The goal of modern hate crime legislation is to punish people for what they were thinking in addition to their actions. It’s an attempt to criminalize thoughts, which is about as unconstitutional as possible; it’s the opposite of the Founders’ intentions.
Yet we are on this path, fueled once more by the media working in tandem with bitterness and resentment:
Justice is under fire in this country, but not in the way the media would have us believe. Don’t expect the aftermath of this trial to be any better than the atmosphere that led to it.