I think there are multiple reasons why the Trayvon Martin incident has become a big deal socially. I have a low opinion of the motives of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, and I think Carl gets at some of the truth. When something gets this big, a lot of different kinds of people and a lot of different interests get involved. You get the Jesse Jackson coming to town and you get NBC editing the George Zimmerman audio tape. But the Trayvon Martin controversy was more than that and there was something spontaneous in much of the reaction. A lot of young African-Americans and Latinos with little or no interest in politics took a very sudden interest in the shooting of Trayvon Martin. I’ve talked to some of them (a tiny fraction of course.) They don’t know and don’t care about Jesse Jackson. They weren’t born the last time Jackson ran for president. They would no more choose to watch Al Sharpton’s MSNBC show than they would watch choose to watch C-SPAN3. The Trayvon Martin shooting, as it was originally reported, resonated with them. They had experience of being followed or hassled by suburban cops. They had the sense that, if they were away from home ground and anything went badly wrong and the situation was at all ambiguous, the local authorities would collude to screw them over. It wasn’t Jim Crow and they knew enough of history to know it wasn’t Jim Crow, but it still felt like the majority of the places in the country were hostile ground to them. It made them feel peripheral and they knew that there were millions of other Americans who could, as strangers, walk those same streets and face fewer hassles and risks. Whatever happened in the Trayvon Martin shooting, these feelings are real.
So the reporting of the Trayvon Martin shooting fit into a narrative that these young people carried around with them. A local adult suburban racist picks a fight with a innocent black kid who was getting Skittles. The black kid kicks the racist’s butt in a fair fight. The racist then shoots the black kid and the authorities cover it up. It sounded right and it was infuriating. It felt like their own experiences (or those of their friends) only taken to heroic proportions and ending in martyrdom. It was the clearest possible example of how they felt the world worked for them and a lever to focus their efforts not only to get justice (as they saw it) in this one case but also a way to get other people to acknowledge what happens to them on a much smaller scale – a scale that doesn’t show up in the murder statistics.
More of the facts will come out and we’ll see how much and what parts of the above narrative hold up. I don’t have any public policy suggestions.
April 6th, 2012 | 12:05 pm
Pete, great post, because it touches upon the truly important aspect of the case: how should the media and political leaders react when, via social media, an infuriating story-line, that touches upon racial division (yes, there are other divisions in our citizenry as potentially radioactive, but everyone knows the potency of this one), gets “legs?”
Now I don’t know the p’s and q’s of how this story initially “got legs” in social media channels, or what role local and national media played in it getting such legs.
But this I do know: Americans should not have been forced, by the national media, into having to care about this story. My impression, which is not that of someone who monitors TV news very much, is that the major media outlets, Fox included, ran with this big, and some of them ran with it nearly non-stop.
Was a man murdered in Seattle yesterday? Was another shot in Phoenix? Did someone say the word “coon” or “honky” in a Boston bar-fight?
I don’t know. These sorts of things do happen all the time somewhere in the USA. But I shouldn’t have to know or care about what are and should remain local crime stories. But now I do have to have an opinion about Martin and Zimmerman, apparently.
Healthy world:
There is a killing, coming out of a confrontation between two men in Florida. Outside of the immediate areas of Florida, there is no news-media reporting of what happened. Editors do hear from a few reporters that there seem to be angles that deal with a) one of the men’s reliance on the “stand your ground” law, b) his being a general pro-gun, neighborhood-watch sort of guy, and c) the possibility that his attack was racially motivated. But editors say, “well, keep your eye on those aspects as the facts develop, especially through the criminal process, and if either a), b), or c) do seem the motivation, see if you can connect the story to others with similar patterns in other cases, and then we’ll do a major story on it.”
And, the editors of that area say very specifically: “And since c) has been suggested as a possibility, emphasize the facts of case still-emerging aspect. Hasty reporting and/or unanswered rumors here can lead to violence.”
Or, national editors, faced with a genuine social-media outbreak of the local story that requires some coverage, say the same thing to their anchors–”run with this, but not constantly, and with the facts developing line regularly emphasized.”
So, the minority youths of Florida and the U.S. do not get stirred up, race-hucksters do not have a chance to make them more pessimistic about racism than they should be, an elderly gentleman does not get beat up, others do not get threatened, and you and I do not hear about it, and we devote our energies to more important matters.
I feel no obligation, for example, to consider whether my man John Presnall’s judgment of Zimmerman’s character in the post below is correct. Nor am I called upon to lend my ears to audio-analysis of 911 calls. I remain more concerned with the motivations of James Madison and co., of characters in Ralph Ellison novels and Shakespeare plays, of Jesus during his passion, of our president, of political science departments that might hire me, of my wife, of my own sinful self, etc.
Unhealthy world: ours. Entirely thanks to sick habits of our national media, habits the sick-enough national media of thirty years ago simply didn’t let itself have.
Pete makes me think that perhaps the social media aspect of the story forced the national editors’ hands, however. Do others know the score here? Still, I think they had ways of dousing the fire…
But let me end with a little rant: Journalists, grow up and do your part to serve your country. And NBC journalists, refuse to report to work until you get a promise that all the guilty parties will be ferreted out and FIRED.
April 6th, 2012 | 2:15 pm
Irrespective of politcal sides who will end up
“holding the bag” when racial violence spreads
thru America? will those who live in “gated communities” defend causcasians who are targeted by african american,and blacks attacked by white?when this ends as bloody dangerous riots and people die(who had nothing to do with anything racial) will all you brave armed self anoited Nra activists defend me? i think the law that allows insane gun toteing
fools to play cop must be changed? to protect the inocent.
April 6th, 2012 | 4:48 pm
Carl, I dunno. I do think it would have been better if the larger media had focused more on the the still emerging element of the story, but the widespead underlying resentments and fears I mention above, the sense that insiders might be perpetrating a bag job and denying justice for a dead kid, the political incentives for the Jacksons and the Sharptons of the world, the sense of the Martin family that going to the media was their only chance for a fair shake, the commercial imperatives of the media, the political orientation of many of the reporters and editors, and I surely missed a bunch of other things. There are just so many elements that converge that it makes my head hurt.
April 7th, 2012 | 11:41 am
It’s a pity they ‘carry that narrative’ around with them, because it does not reflect social reality. White-on black crime isa small problem in this country and unless their personal history is exceedingly unusual, their ‘narrative’ cannot have come from lived experience.
April 7th, 2012 | 6:42 pm
AD, in the sense of being shot (or even beaten), then no. In the sense of feeling threatened and harrassed, well who knows and who knows how ambiguous the particular run ins with local authorities were. I’m sure there are multiple sides to most of those stories. I’ve never heard of one that escalated to point where it would make the papers. I think that is why the Trayvon Martin thing – and especially the initial story of the Trayvon Martin thing – got so big. It was epic and violent and ended in martyrdom, but some folks I know saw a part of their lived experiences (not being shot, etc.) reflected in the event. I don’t think that this kind projection is a good way to make public policy or determine guilt or innocence.
April 7th, 2012 | 7:54 pm
Pete, I’m not sure I agree with you that the Trayvon story got really big, really fast, rather that there’s, what appears to be, a continuing tension/apathy/hatred between the races in the United States, in 2012.
I would really appreciate it if you directed your considerable talents to analysis of why there is this continuing animosity/hostility. But, fair warning, you might take Derbyshire’s firing to heart. Sometimes the truth is the first casualty.
April 7th, 2012 | 9:18 pm
Bob, aside from the considerable media attention (which night or might not be meaningful) it also seems to have engaged the attention of some people who pay little attention (or who might pay some, but not very intense attention) to public events. History is complicated and I don’t have any thoughts on the matter that are distinctive, comprehensive or especially clear. You’ve already got the sum total of my totally impressionisitc thinking taken from my idiosyncratic experiences. FWIW
April 8th, 2012 | 5:39 pm
Pete: similar idiosyncratic experience. But I might mock and sympathize with Carl’s post somewhat in saying this, but it is difficult to quantify paying little attention or intense attention to public events. In the law school setting it touched off a firestorm of criticism and constitutional questions concerning the 5th ammendment and portions of Constitutional Law typically seen as making up Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure.
I think folks who listen to the 9-11 calls and folks who try to make sense of how our justice system works are just as interested in public events.
I think AD should be a bit more carefull about what does and does not reflect social reality. That really is a lot more contingent upon where you live, what is news to you, what you are sensitive towards.
Carl’s healthy world vs. unhealthy world distinction seems rather perverse. I don’t think you understand that there is a sort of industrial reserve army of bloggers and twitterers, who had already taken up the cause before the media reported on it, they then broke stories and angles as the perculiarities of the case unfolded. This then snowballed.
It is not all that different than say a Santorum or Rick Perry surge. The difference being that this involved a question of Justice and Equality. I also think Primary fatigue could cause these sorts of things. “we devote our energies to more important matters.” -Objection, Irony allert. This is just as capable of becomming a Supreme Court case with its own Era!
In fact I predict this will become a Supreme Court Case.
April 8th, 2012 | 9:38 pm
I think Mr. Spilakios is right on, especially where he says that the “Martin shooting fit into a narrative that these young people carried around with them.” And what made the story get big even faster was that this narrative ran smack into another very powerful, emotionally laden narrative: the lone, armed citizen who defends his neighborhood from crime, half a dozen versions of which appear in the first pages of every issue of The American Rifleman. And both sides are willing to distort the facts so they can stuff this tragedy into the confines of their favorite narrative. Hence the despicable efforts to portray an innocent, never-arrested teenager as if he were a gangbanger, and to portray a young Hispanic man, who had many black friends and protested police brutality against blacks, as if he were a Klansman.
April 9th, 2012 | 9:39 am
Dan, I dunno about your explication of events? For the first few weeks I heard in the MSM terms like the ‘doe-eyed’ Trayvon, and ‘white Hispanic’ and of course NBC had audio ‘proof’ that Zimmerman was a racist and ABC, I believe, hid Zimmerman’s apparent head wounds, and so forth. However, as the days and weeks went by and more and more evidence, and witness statements have come forward the situation has changed a bit.
April 9th, 2012 | 10:48 am
Is it just a coincidence –speaking of political significance– that the story really blew up –with school walkouts and media blitz– on the very day that there were demonstrations all over the country against Obama’s signature legislation?
April 9th, 2012 | 5:32 pm
Robert, the discredited NBC report that Zimmermann used a racist slur is exactly the kind of thing I meant: a distortion of the facts to make Martin’s death fit the narrative of a racial profiling (which, as Mr. Spilakios pointed out, millions of young black or Hispanic men have experienced). Likewise, the fake photo of Martin flashing the bird that appeared on Malkin’s Twitchy website was a distortion of the facts to make the killing fit the other narrative: the heroic citizen crimefighter defending himself and his turf from a young thug (which also actually happens sometimes).
Two different groups of people very badly want two contradictory versions of this story to be true, and each is willing to lie to get its own version accepted. That has led to the media firestorm.
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