Many players in the media's abject failure to divine the truth in the Zimmerman case

There is a reason why juries are supposed to be "sequestered"--if they are allowed access to media coverage that does not even pretend to be objective, and gives the impression that "everyone" shares its viewpoint, then jurors who are easily swayed by emotion usually reach an unjust verdict. Listening to juror B-29 on ABC, it is clear that since the George Zimmerman trial,  whatever rationality and objectivity she had has faded as would any person with a weak will. Now she claims that Zimmerman "got away with murder," and now there are "suggestions" that the jury didn't "understand"  their instructions; of course one wonders what a mostly black jury didn't "understand" when it acquitted O.J. Simpson of a brutal double-homicide, and why certain people cheered in a shocking display of  jubilation over it (you do know, of course, that a soaked leather glove--even with blood--shrinks so it doesn't "fit"). The reality remains that this was a self-defense case, not a racial case save in the way a Latino has been demonized by both blacks and whites. The problem with the media when it gets it wrong  after being so invested in a conviction is that it cannot stand embarrassment, and continues to flail about hoping to convince as many people as possible that it was "right" all along.

Meanwhile, the UK Daily Mail still claims that “America” is “erupting” over the Zimmerman verdict, which only confirms that the Brits are as clueless about Americans as the American media is. Since Barack Obama’s comments on the Zimmerman verdict last Friday, it seems as if it had a mild effect on the level of rhetoric. Not that it was needed to cool heels in every forum; NPR hasn’t talked about the verdict and its aftermath at all, but that is only because discussing the race angle impinges on NPR’s gender agenda. The president was presumably attempting to placate part of his base by acknowledging the sensitivities of blacks who feel they are unjustly stereotyped as having criminal tendencies. This is undoubtedly a belief that has a measure of truth—although if they are using Trayvon Martin as an example of “innocent” youth, they could have picked a better poster “child “ It also should go without saying that Latino males are also targets of “clicking locks” and being followed in malls; in fact I would say that white folks are much more self-conscious about the way their mannerisms are perceived by black males than the way they convey their attitudes toward Latino males (especially women); but to say so would dilute the victimization politics at play. 

Obama also tried to address the feelings of those who believe a much bigger problem in the black community are the self-inflicted wounds, using the word “dysfunction” to describe some aspects of the “culture” that the media and the market have helped nourish, because it “sells.” Black conservative Shelby Steele was a little more pointed in his assessment of the lack of acknowledgement of relativism in the current rhetoric; writing in the Wall Street Journal recently, Steele observed that “One wants to scream at all those outraged at the Zimmerman verdict: Where is your outrage over the collapse of the black family? Today's civil-rights leaders swat at mosquitoes like Zimmerman when they have gorillas on their back. Seventy-three percent of all black children are born without fathers married to their mothers. And you want to bring the nation to a standstill over George Zimmerman?”

There is no doubt that the Zimmerman case has had a profound effect on my view of the world. It hasn’t turned me into a conservative by any stretch, but it has soured me on my perceptions of who my “friends” are. The left-wing press, after all, is in part responsible for much of the negative perceptions of Latinos in this country (such as scapegoating them for low-wages and unemployment), and some of the rhetoric is beyond what my stomach can hold. Ever since the verdict, the left-wing media, unable to face the fact that their total lack of objectivity has blown up in their faces, have been reduced to flailing-up more controversy when polls show that two-thirds or more Americans believe that the verdict was properly aligned with the facts of the case, or continuing to make embarrassing fools of themselves. 

For example, there was news recently that Zimmerman and a friend encountered an overturned vehicle on a highway after the trial, and helped to extricate the passengers from the wreck. The people who were assisted have since come forward to refute “rumors” that the rescue was “staged,” but also that they fear that any connection to Zimmerman might “endanger” their lives. What inanity can they be talking about? Here is some commentary from “progressives” Bill Press and Stephanie Miller:

Bill Press: Well, I would hope that if you come across a car accident that anybody, even a murderer, would get out and help them out, right? Not get out and kick them in the teeth or something. But so, two questions I have about this to both of you. Number one, what does it matter that he helped somebody out of a car? Doesn't erase the fact that he shot and killed Trayvon Martin, right? 

Two people present provide an emphatic “No.”

Press: Unjustifiably in my opinion and I think the facts show that. But secondly, all right, I know I'm going to get in trouble for this, do you really think this happened?

One person says “No” and explains 

Yeah, I don't think so. It smells, it stinks to high heaven!...Where are the pictures or video?...Yeah!

Stephanie Miller: All right, join us if you're calling bullshit on this George Zimmerman rescued story. ... Oh, this just in regarding the Southwest Airlines flight, breaking, Zimmerman steps in and acts as nose gear for plane and pulled out 300 passengers from the wreckage.

See what I’m talking about? Now, I’m not going to tell you that there are no Latino males who are “punks,” “thugs” and “gangstas.” There are. But is Zimmerman one of them? Although Miller and company make outlandish accusations and personal attacks based on base ignorance, I don’t see the evidence.

I’m not letting the Latino advocate press and organizations off the hook, either. In fact, they have been as pathetic and mendacious as anyone in the media. The National Council de la Raza, for example, has always seemed to be group more focused on the concerns of a narrow demographic, that is the white (as in Caucasian) elite. It has never been in forefront of issues of discrimination, xenophobia and demonization of Latinos that the illegal immigration issue has served as a convenient excuse to express. After all, Pat Buchanan wasn’t just talking about illegal immigrants when he blathered “Hispanics are out to destroy America.”

Completely ignoring how the “mainstream” media has trampled on Zimmerman’s right to due process and the facts of the case, and the reality that as a Latino male he represents an easy target for both blacks and whites, NCLR president Janet Murguia fumed that “While we respect the legal process and the jury’s decision, we are deeply disappointed and saddened by this verdict…However, we believe that it is still possible to achieve some measure of justice for Trayvon Martin and his family, so we are joining with our brothers and sisters in the Black community in calling on the Department of Justice to weigh in more forcefully on the matter." Brothers and sisters in the black community sounds nice in theory, but is it true on the ground? I would agree that blacks and Latinos should have “common ground,” but that doesn’t take into account of the very real resentment that many blacks feel toward Latinos as “competitors” for jobs.

Meanwhile, Antonio Gonzalez, president of William C. Velasquez Institute, told a credulous Fox News Latino the Zimmerman case “does not have a ‘Hispanic angle’ because Hispanics usually rally on the perception of injustice ‘When there is a clear ethnically based perception that somebody is being wronged, Hispanics will rally. This is like a square peg in a round hole…it just doesn’t fit.’” Latinos in general are not that dumb; they can see that the demonization of Zimmerman goes beyond simply him. He serves as a proxy for negative perceptions of Latinos by both blacks and whites; I know this from the not infrequent accusatory and malevolent stares from complete strangers I observe, even in so-called “progressive” Seattle. 

There has also been some discussion concerning the problematic issue of what exactly is Zimmerman’s “race.” The absurdity of this discussion began when the white media misread the black community’s resentment of what Zimmerman personified, and labeled him “white” merely because of his name. To anyone presented with just his face, Zimmerman is Latino. This isn’t a “coincidence.” It is a biological fact that darker skin color and eyes are “dominate” genes. That is why a child born of one parent with brown eyes and another with blue eyes has 75 percent chance of having brown eyes. As we can see with Pres. Obama, having a white mother (and being raised by his white grandparents), has not assisted anyone for mistaking him for “white.”  Zimmerman is not “white” and the reaction of many people toward him has everything to do with the fact that he isn’t.

Robert Zimmerman, Jr. has gone on record to say that he and his brother do consider themselves to be “Hispanic” and that the reason that they declined to mak a point of it was because they wanted to avoid bringing race into the trial. He mused, however, that if their name was “Lopez” or “Gonzalez” the media might have taken a different tack. But that hasn’t stopped some people of making a mess of things, particularly people who have a victim complex they want to protect. Sometime CNN contributor Roland Martin, who is black, insisted that there are “white” Hispanics, which I took to mean that he believes that the  Zimmerman/Trayvon dynamic really is a black/white issue. 

Well, it isn’t. It’s a Latino/black issue (with the white media manipulating the proceedings), and commentators like (Roland) Martin wish to keep the racist theme intact, instead of addressing black attitudes toward Latinos. Martin recently mentioned a CNN meeting to discuss whether they should use the term “white Hispanic” to describe Zimmerman as such. Martin says that people are “ignorant” when they say there is no such thing as a “white Hispanic.” Well of course there are; the problem is that Zimmerman is not one of them. A “white” Hispanic looks like Texas’ Sen. Ted Cruz, who I’ve mentioned before is 100 percent Caucasian, like the other Euro-elites who control everything in Mexico.

Jonathan Tobin had an interesting article in the magazine Commentary entitled “Hispanics and the Zimmerman Narrative.” He noted that during a forum held by Obama with journalists from the Spanish-language television networks Telemundo and Univision, the Zimmerman case was never mentioned. While the Latino press has a right to decide what is or isn’t a concern to the Latino community, Tobin noted a level of hypocrisy in it as well:

While the prevailing narrative of the case has been to portray the tragic death of Martin as a symbol if not a practical example of white racism against African-Americans, Zimmerman isn’t white. He’s Hispanic. So it is telling that not only have none of the leading lights of the Latino media claimed him as a member of their community, but in doing so have consciously abstained from dealing with the issue of race relations in America that has become the primary topic of political discussion since Saturday night. At least as far as these interviews were concerned, the Hispanic media seems determined to do nothing to alter the prevailing narrative in which Zimmerman is stripped of his own identity as a minority in order to make the point about racist America in a way that allows the left to wave the bloody banner of Jim Crow unimpeded by concern for the sensitivities of Hispanics.

Tobin further observed that despite the fact that Zimmerman was obviously not white, the media and the Trayvon Martin partisans went extraordinary lengths to deny this fact in order to maintain the “narrative”:

Though race was not part of the actual trial that hinged on the facts of the case and the details of the confrontation between Zimmerman and Martin, since the verdict was handed down the discussion in the country about it has focused almost entirely on identity politics and race. Martin has been transformed in much of this discussion from a youth with a mixed record who got into a fight with an armed man into a martyr who was murdered because he was black. But in order to make that narrative persuasive, Zimmerman must be viewed as a “creepy ass cracker”—Martin’s description of Zimmerman according to Rachel Jeantel—and not the son of a woman from South America whose Hispanic appearance doesn’t exactly make him a likely recruit for the Ku Klux Klan. But in order to really think of Zimmerman that way, we must forget his origins and his looks and focus only on his German-sounding last name.

Nothing in Zimmerman’s background suggests that he was a “racist”—in fact the evidence suggest the opposite. But this suggestion was simply intolerable for those wishing to define this case as “evidence” of a country still in the clutches of racism. It is, to an extent, but was this the case to “prove” it?

One needn’t agree with the verdict in order to understand that stripping Zimmerman of his Hispanic identity and making him an honorary member of the white supremacist conspiracy against minorities has been an integral element in the process by which he has been demonized and the case has been inflated into the new paradigm of American racism. Those who only concentrated on the facts of the case rather than the politicized agitation that accompanied it—a group that includes the jurors that acquitted Zimmerman—found it to be a complex and confusing incident that told us little, if anything, about racism in America. But eliminating the defendant’s background makes it easier to think of it as a morality play about racism.

The Latino “advocacy” press and organizations—more out of cowardice than a desire to see “justice” done—completely missed the chance to start a discussion about what it was about Zimmerman in reality which enraged both whites and blacks in such a visceral way, instead joining them in the demonization process with total contempt for due process: 

Perhaps it’s understandable that Hispanic journalists wouldn’t want to risk upsetting their liberal colleagues by disrupting this rhetorical formulation by pointing out Zimmerman’s background or even raising questions about assumptions about race. But their failure to do so is playing a part in perpetuating a distorted discussion that has done more to obscure the truth about race in America than to shed light on it.

Steele, meanwhile, chastised the civil-rights leadership for using “its greatly depleted moral authority to support Trayvon Martin…This young man was, after all, no Rosa Parks—a figure of indisputable human dignity set upon by the rank evil of white supremacy. Trayvon threw the first punch and then continued pummeling the much smaller Zimmerman. Yes, Trayvon was a kid, but he was also something of a menace. The larger tragedy is that his death will come to very little. There was no important principle or coherent protest implied in that first nose-breaking punch. It was just dumb bravado, a tough-guy punch…There are vast career opportunities, money and political power to be gleaned from the specter of Mr. Zimmerman as a racial profiler/murderer; but there is only hard and selfless work to be done in tackling an illegitimacy rate that threatens to consign blacks to something like permanent inferiority. If there is anything good to be drawn from the Zimmerman/Martin tragedy, it is only the further revelation of the corruption and irrelevance of today's civil-rights leadership.”

And so it goes. Zimmerman isn’t the “problem,” and never was. The killing of Trayvon Martin did deserve to be a matter of discussion—only not the “discussion” that the media has been having with itself. And don't bring "God" into this. Outside the fact that Martin was killed, virtually everything said about him by his partisans have been one lie after another. Martin was not going to "heaven" before he was shot, and death hasn't made him a saint; "God" knows what was in his "heart" as he was beating Zimmerman.