Bias, incompetence or manipulation? Things aren’t always what they seem

By David McElroy · April 2, 2012

I find it odd — but not unexpected — that so many people were “choosing sides” last week in the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman issue based on their existing political/social narratives. The facts in the case seem to be constantly changing, so how can anyone have so much confidence about what happened to have a firm opinion about it?

It seems as though most black political leaders are absolutely sure that Martin was murdered by Zimmerman simply for being black in a gated community. They’re convinced that Zimmerman simply followed Martin and murdered him. They want him arrested and charged with murder.

Another group of people — mostly conservatives — are convinced that Zimmerman is innocent. Some of them have set up a defense fund for him and they’ve been gleeful at times to find negative things to report about Martin. To them, it’s all about gun rights, so any assertion that Zimmerman did something wrong is ignored in the name of Second Amendment rights.

I don’t know what happened. I mentioned early last week that I didn’t really have anything to say about the case yet because I didn’t know what the facts were. I still feel that way. As far as I’m concerned, it’s possible that an angry Zimmerman shot Martin in cold blood simply because he didn’t like him in his neighborhood. It’s also possible that Martin was angry at being followed and attacked Zimmerman, leading to Zimmerman shooting to defend himself. I’m sure there are other possible narratives that I haven’t even thought of. That’s the thing. I don’t know the facts. You don’t, either.

Sadly, what you do know has been shaped by watching television news, in most cases. And what you see there is only part of the story — sometimes because of bias, sometimes because of constraints of the medium and sometimes because of simple incompetence. It’s frequently hard to sort out which is which.

Here’s an example. The picture that’s mostly been used of Zimmerman shows a brooding guy in an old mug shot. He doesn’t look like someone I’d want to encounter on a dark street. On the other hand, the picture we’ve mostly seen of Martin has been of a baby-faced boy. His family supplied that photo. But another side of Martin has emerged. The picture above is one that Martin used on a Twitter account. It shows a tattooed, thuggish-looking kid shooting a bird at the camera. It’s a very different image. And what of Zimmerman? The booking picture was taken in 2005. A more recent photo shows a pleasant-looking guy who you wouldn’t mind having as a neighbor. (They’re the photos at the top of this column.) Some news people are starting to ask whether the pictures manipulated the story. I don’t think there’s any question about that.

The racial aspects might have been blown out of proportion, too. Take this example from NBC News, which NBC now says that it’s investigating. In the audio clip of Zimmerman’s 911 call, this is what the audio says:

Zimmerman: This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black.

It appears that Zimmerman is assuming Martin is “up to no good” because he’s black. But now take a look at the unedited version. He only brings up race after the 911 dispatcher asked for a racial description. NBC edited that part out. Here’s the actual exchange:

Zimmerman: This guy looks like he’s up to no good. Or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about.

Dispatcher: OK, and this guy — is he black, white or Hispanic?

Zimmerman: He looks black.

The context of Zimmerman’s racial response changes everything. It was a response to a question — simply giving information that was requested. The way NBC edited it makes it appear that Zimmerman was profiling and assuming that a black man must be up to no good. That’s the first thing I thought when I read the edited version last week. The reality is more neutral. It doesn’t tell us a lot.

The bottom line is that we don’t have enough facts to say what happened. There are conflicting stories. A witness claims that Martin jumped on Zimmerman, but Martin’s supporters point to video at one point that seems to show Zimmerman without the injuries he supposedly received in the altercation. Each side in the dispute is eager to believe the flimsy public evidence supporting the theory it believes. Based on everything I can see, there’s no way to come to a conclusion based on what we know.

Maybe the police did a shoddy investigation. Maybe Zimmerman should have been charged with something. I honestly don’t know. You don’t, either, because what you know has been picked up from the bits and pieces that media give us, edited and selected. We don’t know yet what bias has gotten in the way. We don’t know what incompetence got in the way.

The only thing we can say is that it’s a tragedy that a teen-ager died that night. Someone — and maybe both people involved — made serious mistakes that led to the death. The bigger tragedy, though, is that a lot of people are using the tragic death to push political agendas. They’re interested in political and social agendas, not the facts. Let’s wait for all the facts before we even attempt to have opinions about who was right and who was wrong.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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