Race and the MSM

Ordinarily, I wait until the next day to make another post about something that piqued my interest, but today I've decided to forego the wait and just let loose.  I was reading, as I do almost daily, nbcnews.com, and saw an article about George Zimmerman, the man who shot Trayvon Martin, waiving temporarily a hearing on the stand your ground immunity defense.  Because I'm not from Florida, I don't particularly understand all the intricacies and nuances of the SYG defense, so I wanted to see what waiver of the defense meant in practical terms.  I still don't know what it all means because I got sidetracked by more editorializing by the MSM.

In the third paragraph of the story, this nugget appeared:

Zimmerman, who has pleaded not guilty, is a former neighborhood watch volunteer of white and Hispanic descent who has maintained he shot Martin on Feb. 26, 2012, in self-defense after Martin attacked him.

Unless one has been living under a rock for the last year or so and is unaware of the basic facts, Zimmerman was a member of some self-appointed Neighborhood Watch outfit who shot and killed a black teenager, Trayvon Martin, allegedly in self-defense under the SYG law.  I don't know whether Zimmerman has a valid defense or not.  That's not the issue here.

Look closely at the part in bold.  For those of you not familiar with Zimmerman, here's a photo:

Zimmerman is the son of a Caucasian father and a Peruvian mother.  Martin, for all I know, is strictly African American.  What galls me is that the MSM is splitting hairs in an attempt to sway bias against Zimmerman.

How is that, you ask?  Well, let's go with what we know:  Zimmerman is biracial.  Yes, he's of white and Hispanic descent.  Those are facts.  It's not the facts themselves but how they're presented.

If the headline read Hispanic Shoots Black, would the outrage be as great as if it were White of Hispanic Descent Shoots Black?  Of course not.  By injecting the white v. black angle, what now exists is a racial controversy.  Why let the facts get in the way of a good story?

Rahm Emanuel is credited, lately, with pushing the phrase Never waste a good crisis.  The MSM is taking it a step farther and pushing its agenda by the presentation or non-presentation of the news.  By couching this story as a white of Hispanic descent shooter, the MSM ups the racial ante, ensuring that readers are going to think that there was a racial motivation -- or at least moreso than if the line read that Zimmerman is Hispanic. 

It's undeniable that Zimmerman is biracial.  I'm not arguing that he isn't.  Factually, nbcnews.com is correct.  But compare and contrast that with how it describes other high-profile biracial people:

When is the last time you heard Barack Obama, Alicia Keys, Mariah Carey, Derek Jeter, Shemar Moore, Lenny Kravitz, Tiger Woods, Soledad O'Brien or Halle Barry described as whites of African American descent?  For that matter, when was the last time anyone in the MSM dared to call them biracial?  Because they're accomplished in their respective fields, they are black.  But if outlets like nbcnews.com are going to bend over backward to be factually correct, shouldn't these folks bear some hyphenated, awkward yet accurate description?  Or is it only when someone is charged with a crime that factual accuracy is important?

One possible argument in favor of such hyperaccuracy is that for too long, blacks who were the product of biracial couples weren't extended the same courtesy.  By that measure, whites should endure four hundred years of slavery.  In the same breath, why does Zimmerman deserve to bear the weight of faceless white racists to whom he bears no relation?  The MSM knows full well what it's doing:  It's invoking a corollary of Emanuel's dictum about using a good crisis for political gain.  Here, the MSM is using hyperaccuracy to ratchet up the sensationalism of its story to attract and keep readers.

It's unfair.  There's no other way to describe this.  If and when I'm charged with a crime, I want my headlines to be accurate: white of Irish, Polish, Russian and German descent charged with....  That way, people can draw their own conclusions from the stereotypes contained in my DNA:  I did it because I'm a lush, I'm stupid, I'm a Communist and because I'm warlike.  Perhaps then I'd have a built-in defense.

My touchstone in this is what my liberal friend Bill said after the Benghazi affair:  the MSM is letting the country down.  By its constant editorializing by presentation of the news, the MSM is closer to Dr. Goebbels and Leni Riefenstahl than it is to the proud tradition of the free media that flourished in the most free country on earth.  This is demagoguery at its worst, wielded by those who have control of news outlets.  Unless and until this changes, the country will continue on its downward spiral from greatness to mediocrity to worse.

(c) 2013 The Truxton Spangler Chronicles