Op-Ed

Since I wrote about the tragic death of Trayvon Martin last week, I’ve gotten some very interesting feedback. I wrote what I wrote because I was bothered by the media coverage condemning George Zimmerman as a murderer before allowing our judicial system to work. 

Never once did I say that George Zimmerman was innocent or justified in his actions. Trayvon did not deserve to die, and I’m absolutely sick for his family. I would’ve left well enough alone, but this story had made national news, and the media was misrepresenting the facts of the case to paint Zimmerman as a cold-blooded killer that murdered a little boy because of racism.

Trayvon was not a little boy. At seventeen years old, he was legally a child, but physically he was a 6-foot-tall man. He was not sunshine and rainbows -- he had a vulgar mouth, and was on suspension from school for drug possession. When Zimmerman apprehended him, he chose to bash the dude’s head into the ground instead of trying to call the police.

The real issue here is not who was right or wrong, because both men were wrong. Zimmerman should have listened to the police and stayed in his car, and Trayvon should have restrained himself from resorting to physical violence. The issue here is the media jumping to conclusions to push their ‘racism is still rampant’ agenda.

After I wrote the post, I got into an interesting Twitter conversation with a fellow political mom blogger on the liberal side of the aisle. She pointed to ‘evidence’ that Zimmerman had not received any blows from Trayvon, and claimed that I had misrepresented facts. It was kind of ironic, given that the story I wrote was about media misrepresentation, and I had carefully and thoughtfully researched all evidence available at the time.

If the evidence I had turned out to be wrong, so be it. It doesn’t change my opinion that people jumped all over this to condemn someone without a trial by a jury of his peers. It turns out she was wrong. Trayvon had bloodied Zimmerman, and the media’s eagerness to grab onto a narrative without examining the evidence just proves my point.

The number one thing I have heard from people that didn’t like what I wrote is that I was blatantly denying the racial aspects of this case. I got pointed to the 911 recording reported by NBC, where Zimmerman points out that Trayvon is black. I still didn’t think that proved Zimmerman’s supposed racism, because Trayvon was black. Why is it racist to point out defining characteristics when trying to identify a person?

But the story doesn’t end there … apparently NBC selectively edited the tape, conveniently cutting out the audio of the dispatcher specifically asking Zimmerman to identify the suspect as “black, white, or Hispanic.” This is my point exactly. The media has moved beyond ignoring evidence to creating it.

There are so many wronged parties involved in this incident that it’s hard to name them all. A media eager to feed us a story rather than report the facts has wronged all of us. A public taking the biased media at face value has wronged George Zimmerman by condemning him without allowing our legal system to work.

The most wronged of all is Trayvon Martin, who lost his life in a tragic incident that never should have happened.