The funny part about the pictures of Martin with gold fronts, is that he looks pretty young in those pictures. Somehow, we're supposed to believe that the photo of him as a kid that the media passed along is proof of a conspiracy, but the picture of him as a kid with gold fronts is proof that he's a vicious killer.
As much as you want to whistle past this particular graveyard, there's no
rational way to argue that the media acted anything near responsibly in coverage of this story.
When the media began coverage of this story, Zimmerman was painted as white. I agree that the police reports described Zimmerman as a white male, but they continued with this narrative long after Zimmerman's ethnicity became apparent. Worse even, Zimmerman's ethnicity had no real bearing on the actual events, but the media as whole introduced it as one. They chose this narrative and continued it even after it became very apparent that it was in error. The template was set.
The fact that most began my interest in this case was the photographic depection of Martin. His apparent age and physical depection led me to believe that there could be no reasonable cause for justification for a grown man to shoot an unarmed preteen - which was how the photos depicted Martin. Once again, the template for the media was a white guy shot an unarmed black preteen. Of course, we now know that particualr facet of this media template was first in error (the Martin family only released the younger pictures) but that wasn't harmless error. The apparent physical disparity goes to the heart of the case. They should have never ran those misleading pictures and if they decided to, they should have been heavily captioned and explained in the article itself.
The media presupposed police misconduct in this case. One can argue that the police acted without due diligence but again, they lewft out any other explanation for police actions. It was not until the SPD cited the statutory limitation against arrest theat they even deemed it worth mentioning. They did not mention until much later that Zimmerman volunteered statements, that he was in police custody, that the gun was seized as evidence, etc... Instead, they chose to inflame the white man shooting a yound black kid while the police turned a blind eye.
They misrepresented the injuries to Zimmerman, they chose to hide the claim that Zimmerman was the one pleading for help, etc....
There has been
three employees of NBC fired for three seperate instances of editing recordings of Zimmerman's call to police. In each instance, they cut out intervening comments and placed Zimmerman's claims of suspicious behavior next to a description of Martin's apparent ethnicity.
For my own part, I have been very reticent to cast aspersions on Martin's conduct prior to the night of the shooting, even after every little wart from Zimmerman has been recited
ad naseum here. You cannot, in good faith, contend that Zimmerman's past is relevant to his propensity to overreact that night and pretend that Martin's prior conduct is off-limits. It's one way or another.
