Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman and the blurry line between conservative media and the far-right
From 'The Independent' (UK) blogs......
A man is known by the company he keeps. One day before Florida courts charged George Zimmerman with the murder of Trayvon Martin, armed neo-Nazis in shiny black boots were patrolling the streets. “We want to be sure that white residents of the area feel safe,” one of them told The Independent’s Guy Adams. But their conflation of protection and victimisation is nothing new in Sanford, Florida. For the last few weeks their online counterparts have been uncomfortably close to the conservative media in a campaign to smear the dead teenager before his killer was even charged.
Zimmerman is in the hands of the law, now, and his guilt or innocence remains to be proven. But his case has been political dynamite (on Tuesday came the bizarre twist that George Zimmerman was confiding in conservative talk radio host Sean Hannity even while his lawyers were desperate to contact him). Campaigns for an arrest had gone on for some time, but once the President got involved, things got partisan. After Barack Obama told Martin’s parents “if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon”, blogs and websites surrounding key conservative figures like Glenn Beck and Dick Cheney began calling for the country to ‘wait for the facts’ and respect ‘due process’, rallying on Twitter around the #teamdueprocess hashtag. They did this by implying that Martin was a criminal.
On March 19, Beck’s website, The Blaze, speculated without much evidence that Martin could have been suspended from school for drug possession, “sexual harassment”, or “arson”. The Miami Herald spent four paragraphs listing ‘suspicious’ facts about Martin’s bags (like “women’s jewellery” and a “burglary tool”) and on the same day, The Daily Caller, co-founded by Dick Cheney, published a compilation of tweets reportedly culled from Martin’s deleted Twitter account, by an ‘undisclosed source’. The Conservative Review immediately branded the teen “a criminal thug on his way to a life in prison”.
Full article:
http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2012/04/13/trayvon-martin-george-zimmerman-and-the-blurry-line-between-conservative-media-and-the-far-right/
