Observations: The QandO Podcast for 29 Apr 12
This week, Bruce and Dale talk about what the Trayvon martin case says about the media.
The direct link to the podcast can be found here.
As a reminder, if you are an iTunes user, don’t forget to subscribe to the QandO podcast, Observations, through iTunes. For those of you who don’t have iTunes, you can subscribe at Podcast Alley. And, of course, for you newsreader subscriber types, our podcast RSS Feed is here. For podcasts from 2005 to 2010, they can be accessed through the RSS Archive Feed.
New tone: How culpable is the news media and the left in this crime? (Update)
I ask because I have found the coverage of the Trayvon Martin shooting and death to be sensationalist and, many times, based in rumor later found to be incorrect.
Or, to put a finer point on it, the coverage of the case has been anything but objective and fact based.
For instance, the original reports that said the incident was a white on black killing. In fact, Zimmerman isn’t white. He’s Hispanic. ABC then published a video from the police station claiming there was no evidence of injury. A closer look revealed ample evidence of injury, but that meme had already traveled the world twice. MSNBC, not to be out done, made the claim that Zimmerman uttered a racial slur that was caught on the 911 tape. Again, when examined more closely, it appeared clear that it wasn’t a racial slur at all, but a comment on the weather.
Meanwhile, the race baiters, attracted to the killing like sharks to chum, had picked up on the story as presented by the media and converged on Sanford FL, the site of the killing, to seek “justice” for Trayvon Martin.
Well, apparently some of it was served yesterday … in Mobile, AL:
Mobile police need your help to catch a mob that beat Matthew Owens so badly that he’s in critical condition.
According to police, Owens fussed at some kids playing basketball in the middle of Delmar Drive about 8:30 Saturday night. They say the kids left and a group of adults returned, armed with everything but the kitchen sink.
Police tell News 5 the suspects used chairs, pipes and paint cans to beat Owens.
Owens’ sister, Ashley Parker, saw the attack. "It was the scariest thing I have ever witnessed." Parker says 20 people, all African American, attacked her brother on the front porch of his home, using "brass buckles, paint cans and anything they could get their hands on."
And, according to Ms. Parker, as they were leaving something else occurred:
What Parker says happened next could make the fallout from the brutal beating even worse. As the attackers walked away, leaving Owen bleeding on the ground, Parker says one of them said "Now that’s justice for Trayvon." Trayvon Martin is the unarmed teenager police say was shot and killed February 26 by neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida.
The left is fond of trying to blame the right for inciting incidents of violence. The Gabby Gifford shooting is the most recent example.
I have to wonder if the news media who sensationalized the Martin shooting and the race hustlers who inflamed the situation are willing to take the blame for this beating?
UPDATE: Ace points to two more beatings that appear to have been motivated by the Martin case.
~McQ
Twitter: @McQandO
Observations: The QandO Podcast for 22 Apr 12
This week, Michael, and Dale talk about the Trayvon Martin case, Hillary Rosen, and the economy.
The direct link to the podcast can be found here.
As a reminder, if you are an iTunes user, don’t forget to subscribe to the QandO podcast, Observations, through iTunes. For those of you who don’t have iTunes, you can subscribe at Podcast Alley. And, of course, for you newsreader subscriber types, our podcast RSS Feed is here. For podcasts from 2005 to 2010, they can be accessed through the RSS Archive Feed.
Observations: The QandO Podcast for 15 Apr 12
This week, Michael, and Dale talk about the Trayvon Martin case, Hillary Rosen, and the economy.
The direct link to the podcast can be found here.
As a reminder, if you are an iTunes user, don’t forget to subscribe to the QandO podcast, Observations, through iTunes. For those of you who don’t have iTunes, you can subscribe at Podcast Alley. And, of course, for you newsreader subscriber types, our podcast RSS Feed is here. For podcasts from 2005 to 2010, they can be accessed through the RSS Archive Feed.
Has the Trayvon Martin incident become more about the media than the shooting?
If you’ve been following this incident at all, you know that much of what was initially reported was wrong and some of what has been reported since was false, manufactured and/or misleading.
American Thinker has a good round up of the story to this point. In the article, Jeff Lipke outlines the “myth” as it was perpetrated by the media.
The two worst offenders in my opinion have been NBC and ABC. NBC aired an edited 911 tape which was clearly meant to depict George Zimmerman as a racist. They continue to try to defend it as a “mistake”. No one with any common sense is buying that nonsense.
ABC used footage of Zimmerman’s arrival at the Sanford police station to claim that it didn’t support his claim he’d been attacked as there was no evidence of blood or contusions. Never mentioned was the fact that Zimmerman had been treated by EMTs who are not in the habit of leaving visible blood on a patient they treat. Subsequent enhancement showed that initial claim by ABC to have been incorrect. Additionally, ABC claimed that Zimmerman had used a racial slur when talking to the 911 operator. Again, enhancing the audio makes it clear he didn’t and instead seems to be remarking about how cold it was that night. In fact, for central Florida, it was a cold night. But ABC jumped to the conclusion because it supported the desired evolving story line – it was a racial killing.
The unraveling of the myth seems to have the whole story losing steam. That may be why Al Sharpton decided to be a no-show at this weekend’s rally. And there have also been incidents that have done little to gain sympathy for Trayvon Martin. HIs parents attempt to copyright his name obviously hoping to capitalize on his death. Then there was the rally for Martin by members of the school he attended which turned into a flash-mob looting of a local drug store.
But for the media, this has been anything but its finest hour. One of the reoccurring criticism of blogs by the media is they’ll publish anything and have no editors to check them. Yet it is the media, especially the two networks named above, who’ve seemed to fall into that category, editors notwithstanding.
Take the latest story circulating. Supposedly “Neo-Nazis” are patrolling Sanford, FL. The NY Daily News reports this as a fact. But Legal Insurrection’s Professor Jacobson has actually tried to confirm it (wait, isn’t that what editors and research assistants are supposed to do in the media?). And, according to his inquiry to the Sanford Police Department, there’s no evidence of any neo-Nazi group patrolling the city:
My initial e-mail (which included an embedded link to the Memeorandum thread):
“There are a number of reports in the media that Neo-Nazis are conducting armed patrols in Sanford. Can you confirm or deny whether this is true, and provide any information you have on the subject? If someone is able to get back to me as soon as possible (and before Monday) that would be appreciated, since such rumors are spreading.”
Response from Sanford Joint Information Center:
“At this time the City of Sanford has not confirmed the presence of Neo-Nazis groups.”
My follow up:
“You say “not confirmed.” Is there any indication of such patrols that the Department is aware of?”
Further Response from Sanford Joint Information Center:
“We have no indication of any such patrols at this point in Sanford. The only large gathering was the children and their parents at the Easter egg hunt.”
How poorly are we being served by a media which now seems to be engaged in precisely what it criticized blogs for? And how ironic is it that a blog is doing the work the media should be doing? That’s not to say blogs are in the clear. Every left wing blog of any size has been parroting the rumor as well.
But the fact remains this case, no matter how you feel about it, has shown the media in a very unflattering light. Sensationalism, poor journalism, lousy and false editing, conclusion jumping, and rumor mongering have all been evident in their coverage.
And the industry wonders why so many Americans don’t trust them any more?
~McQ
Twitter: @McQandO
Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman and the digital lynch mob
I have to admit watching this “discussion” over the who, what, when, where and how of the shooting of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman with disgust. I refrained from commenting on it when it first hit the news because I have learned enough over the years to recognize stories where one needs to let it develop a bit for all the facts to come out.
Of course that didn’t at all stop the usual suspects from pouncing on what seemed a perfect story with which they could push their favorite racial themes (Jesse Jackson’s “Blacks are under attack” for instance) and for others to involve themselves in something that they really have no business involving themselves in.
It has laid bare the polarization within this country and how extreme it has become.
The story, if you’ve taken time to research it, is nothing like the cut and dried “whitey killed a black man because he was black” meme the race baiters are pushing. In fact, if you’ve bothered to research the story, it appears that race had little if anything to do with this tragedy. It is not a racial issue, even if it has been portrayed as such by the Al Sharptons, Jesse Jacksons and Louis Farrakhans of this world.
George Zimmerman, if anything, appears to have been an overzealous neighborhood watch person with a history of calling in suspicious activities he saw in his neighborhood. Treyvan Martin, who lived 250 miles away from that neighborhood, was apparently acting suspiciously (rummaging through garbage cans, etc.) when Zimmerman spotted him. I doubt that Zimmerman cared one whit what Martin’s skin color was at the time. Apparently somewhere during that time, a confrontation took place, a fight ensued and Zimmerman killed Martin with a shot to the chest.
A witness has come forward saying he saw Martin on top of Zimmerman punching him in the face. Martin, aged 17 and 6 foot 3, was not the innocent “child” the media has tried to portray. He was a probably bigger than Zimmerman and was on a 10 day suspension from school. Obviously that doesn’t justify killing him but it sheds a little different light on the situation.
I can’t get inside the heads of either of these people but is it reasonable to assume, given the situation, that Zimmerman might have feared for his life? Possibly. I don’t know – and neither does anyone else.
Does that justify the shooting. Again, I don’t know.
But of course all the race pimps do. Just ask them. And so they’ve essentially initiated a vendetta against George Zimmerman, who, by the way, isn’t white even though that assumption was immediately made by many given his name. Zimmerman’s mother is Peruvian and of Indian stock.
An example of the thoughtless incitement that is going on can be found with none other than Spike Lee who, uninformed jerk that he is, published Zimmerman’s address on Twitter. Numerous threats to Zimmerman have been published on Twitter as well. The New Black Panthers have put a $10,000 bounty on Zimmerman’s head. Louis Farrakhan tweeted that the “law of retribution may soon be applied”, a not-so-veiled threat against Zimmerman.
The irony, of course, is this is a typical lynch mob mentality being stirred up here. These are calls for violence outside the law.
No one is claiming that George Zimmerman isn’t at fault here. He may very well be. We don’t know yet. That’s for a court of his peers to decide. Certainly not a marginally informed and inflamed mob. If something happens to Zimmerman before his day in court, you can most likely look to the digital lynch mob for the source. I’ve always considered the racist white lynch mobs of the past to be one of the most horrific and disgusting manifestations of the racism of the past. I find what is happening now no less horrific or disgusting.
There’s also another reason this is on the national radar. And it has nothing to do with race. I’ll let my favorite leftist hack columnist at the New York Times lay it out for you:
Florida’s now-infamous Stand Your Ground law, which lets you shoot someone you consider threatening without facing arrest, let alone prosecution, sounds crazy — and it is. And it’s tempting to dismiss this law as the work of ignorant yahoos. But similar laws have been pushed across the nation, not by ignorant yahoos but by big corporations.
If you are inclined to want to see guns controlled or banned and citizens required to flee any sort of confrontation vs. defending themselves, Paul Krugman is right there with you and has the goods on this now “infamous” law.
Except, as usual, it is a mish-mash of half-truths and innuendo cobbled together to make you think that corporate America is actually the villain in all of this.
We talked about this case on the podcast last night. What is going on right now is all too predictable. And it again points out how polarized this country is. And it isn’t getting less polarized.
Final thought. As I recall, President Obama was supposed to be the “post-racial” President, or that was his claim. Yet he has inserted himself in two local incidents that I know of (the Skip Gates incident being the first) and inflamed the incidents with his remarks. That, my friends, is not leadership.
But then, he’s not a leader, and those of us who have actually been in leadership positions in our lives have known that from the beginning. Instead he has difficulty denying his liberal roots and not succumbing to their siren call.
He’s an agitator. And, as usual, he’s stepped in on something he should have stayed out of and made it far worse. Inserting himself has given impetus, cover and justification for the Frarrakhans, Lees, Jacksons, Sharptons and the New Black Panthers to do what they’re doing. Instead of calming the waters and talking about trusting the legal system and letting it do its work, he’s done exactly the opposite.
Congrats, Mr. Prez. If anything happens to Zimmerman, you’re on the hook too as far as I’m concerned.
~McQ
Twitter: @McQandO