By Ben Cohen: The issue of race relations is never far from the media or public debate in America. The latest news from the tragic Trayvon Martin case (a revelation that the police initially seriously doubted shooter George Zimmerman’s account of events) and the controversial immigration ruling in Arizona will no doubt reignite the tensions between white middle America and minority groups. It doesn’t take much for the issue inflame opinion, particularly given the current economic conditions. When paychecks are far and few between and people are uncertain about the future, race relations in the US have historically deteriorated quickly.

Every school child learns that the economic crisis in Germany during the 1930′s instigated the mass persecution of the Jews, but most people are unaware that there were alarming parallels in America at the same time. During the great depression in the 1930′s hundreds of antisemitic organizations arose that were responsible for disseminating propaganda against Jews throughout the American public. Several popular theories ascribed the banking crisis to the meddling of Jews, and an international conspiracy to infiltrate the Roosevelt government. In cities with Jewish populations, it was routine for gangs to vandalize Jewish cemeteries and synagogues, and attack Jews for no apparent reason. Hitler was viewed positively in many communities, and Jews often lived in fear for their safety.

The link between economic hardship and racial tension is alarming, and should be a great cause for concern particularly given the fragile state of the economy today.

As the Republicans continue to hamper recovery efforts and the Democrats refuse to offer an adequate plan to boost the economic growth, America is in danger of reverting back to its darker days when angry whites took out their frustration on immigrants and minorities. Last year in Arizona, race crimes increased by 39%, and the national picture is equally worrying. An article in PolicyMic reveals:

According to hate crime statistics published by the FBI, crimes based on an anti-black racial bias have increased as a proportion to the number of racial hate crimes committed. From 1996 to 2007, the percentage of racial hate crimes committed due to anti-black sentiments was never above 70% (although it did come close at 69.7% in 1996). Since 2008, this percentage has topped 70% every year.

The infighting between those who would broadly be economically defined as working class works very well in the interest of the rich. While wealth inequality surges and legislation passes that works to benefit the rich at the expense of the poor, distractions like the Trayvon Martin case and the anti immigration laws in Arizona are increasingly welcomed by those at the top end of the economic spectrum. As long as working class white people blame immigrants and minorities for their woes, they won’t look to the root causes of the problem – the wholesale theft of wealth that comes from a corrupt banking system and rigged tax code.

Sadly, the perception that immigrants and minorities are responsible for the country’s economic problems is also seeping over into younger generations. As Robert Jones writes in an article on racial tension between college age millenials, a significant number of whites believe that the government is too concerned with the welfare of non-whites:

Overall, almost half of Millennials (46 percent) believe that over the past few decades, the government has paid too much attention to the problems of blacks and other minorities, while only slightly more Millennials disagree (49 percent). A majority (56 percent) of white Millennials say that the government has paid too much attention to the problems of black and other minorities, compared to only 24 percent of black Millennials–a gap of more than 30 points.

This is a troubling picture given the massive progress of civil rights in America, and the public is in desperate need of a functioning media system to educate them about the real reasons behind the country’s economic condition. The truth is that real battle for working people is an economic and class based one, and should have nothing to do with race. It is the fault of the media that ethnicity has such a huge effect during hard times, as there is little to no mention of the underlying problems that cause recessions and economic hardships. The media is owned by the wealthy, and as a consequence it reflect their interests. Rather than break a story about the effects of corporate corruption and widening poverty, the media would rather focus on issues that don’t undermine their interests like election polls and politician’s sex lives.

As race relations get more fraught, the media focuses on outcome, not cause, and given the lack of context people makes up their own mind as to who is to blame. Minorities are often the first to be targeted because it doesn’t require much thought or effort. It is a vicious cycle – poverty breeds ignorance, and ignorance breeds racism. It can be stopped, but only through education. The problem is that through education, people would begin to understand who was really to blame for their predicament, and that simply wouldn’t do.

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Zimmerman's account of events now in serious doubt

From the Huff Post:

A new trove of evidence released by the Florida state attorney prosecuting George Zimmerman for second-degree murder in the killing of Trayvon Martin reveals the extent to which law enforcement doubted Zimmerman’s early claims of self-defense.

“His actions are inconsistent with those of a person who has stated he was in fear of another subject,” an investigator wrote in an early report on the Feb. 26 shooting. “Investigative findings show that George Michael Zimmerman had at least two opportunities to speak with Trayvon Benjamin Martin in order to defuse the circumstances,” and Zimmerman twice “failed to identify himself as a concerned resident or a neighborhood watch member.”

The report also said that Martin’s and Zimmerman’s respective physical dimensions did not place Zimmerman at a disadvantage worthy of lethal force.

“Investigative findings show the physical injuries displayed by [Zimmerman] are marginally consistent with a life-threatening violent episode described by him, during which neither a deadly weapon nor deadly force was deployed by Trayvon Martin,” the report said.

The evidence released this afternoon includes a one-hour video recording of an interview between lead investigator Christopher Serino and Zimmerman at the Sanford, Fla., police headquarters, a pair of audio recordings between Serino and Zimmerman, and 29 pages of police reports and notes, including a handwritten narrative by Zimmerman recounting the events on the night of Feb. 26.

Hours after the release of the new evidence, Serino, who had expressed doubts over Zimmerman’s story and suggested that charges be filed, was reassigned to the patrol division, according to the Associated Press. The reassignment came at his own request, AP reports.

This latest Zimmerman disclosures are the latest in a series of releases of formerly sealed evidence, made public under pressure from media companies, who have argued that full disclosure of the evidence is in the public’s interest. The prosecution and the defense both objected.

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Not defending the man, but the point

By Chez Pazienza: I didn’t want this to turn into a public back-and-forth, but when I wrote a piece last week for this site on the double-standard when it comes to how news outlets cover crimes which are racially motivated or have the potential to be racially motivated, I knew I might be opening a Pandora’s Box. So with that in mind, and after my good friend and podcast partner Bob Cesca penned a response to my original column here a few days ago, I feel like I want to clarify and expand on my views a little.

First of all, I really do hate the fact that even though my motives are much different and I have to believe more noble than theirs, my opinion gets to be lumped in with the likes of Bill O’Reilly and Bernie Goldberg. I don’t like that it looks like I’m defending them when I’m simply defending a point they’ve made — again, regardless of why they made that point. It should also go without saying that I hope I’m not labeled some kind of racist — or a latent racist, unaware of my own racist feelings, a charge that’s almost impossible to defend against — by those who disagree with me on this. I want to make it clear that while O’Reilly and Goldberg seemed to suggest an equivalence between the incident in Virginia and the Trayvon Martin shooting, I did nothing of the sort; they’re completely different cases and they should have been treated differently by the press.

The issue, though, is larger than an unfair comparison between two separate and distinctive events.

I’m not saying that the media don’t report black-on-white crime. Of course they do. Jesus, in a lot of places — mostly local news markets — it’s almost all they do. The difference — the double-standard — occurs when it comes time to tag a crime as racially motivated or to acknowledge a racial component within a crime. When there’s a possibility of labeling a crime racially motivated, the burden of proof is much higher in a black-on-white crime than it is in one that’s white-on-black. I understand completely the history involved — which Bob outlined nicely — and how and why that can come into play, but I’m still not sure that makes it right from the standpoint of journalistic ethics. From what I’ve seen, it would take a person or a group literally shouting “I hate white people” while kicking somebody’s ass for many in the media to report that a black-on-white crime had racial overtones — and if it didn’t appear at first glance to have overt racial overtones they almost certainly wouldn’t go looking any deeper for them.

Again, I do understand the lengthy and incontrovertible history that deserves consideration, but a group of white people beating up on a black person is automatically very suspicious — as it damn well should be — while a group of black people beating up on someone of another race or ethnicity is deemed, what? Business as usual? Just the way things are? Doesn’t the refusal to even acknowledge the racial element in a story like that — particularly when the coverage would be far different were the roles reversed — speak to Goldberg’s claim that the media may be trying to play a paternal role in protecting a minority community from the bigots who’d automatically label them savages or criminals? If so, is it the media’s job to play that paternal role?

There’s no denying that a news organization can often be influenced, sometimes very quietly, by factors not related to the goal of practicing journalism. On my site I’ve written often about the subtle pressure exerted on news producers to be cognizant of any possible liberal bias within their work — a product of years of accusations and strong-arming by the right — and how that can often lead a news department to overcompensate. True objectivity goes out the window in an effort to ensure that conservative critics are appeased — in other words, in the pursuit of the appearance of objectivity. Likewise, there’s an interesting guideline in place in many newsrooms — occasionally unspoken but often discussed openly — that tips its cards to the incredibly delicate way the press handles the subject of race and minority crime. It works like this: If a crime has been committed and the only description you have of the suspect is, say, a black male, 5’11″, wearing a white t-shirt, you don’t air or publish the description. Why? Well, because obviously that would mean police are currently on the lookout for six thousand people; the description is worthless. But its vagueness and consequent lack of value isn’t really the reason the description wouldn’t be run; there have been quite a few times throughout my career where it’s been acknowledged in my presence, and admittedly even affirmed by me, that a non-specific description of an African-American suspect is unfair to the black community.

True, a sketch of a suspect that ambiguous would likely be left out of a story regardless of that suspect’s race or ethnicity, but special attention was always paid to those who were wanted by the police and who happened to be black, often in an effort to avoid inflaming racial tensions or giving fuel to bigots. Of course, again, there’s a history to be considered here, a history of black people being unfairly targeted as suspicious due to nothing more than the color of their skin — see, yes, Trayvon Martin — and maybe it does in fact show journalistic responsibility and an acquiescence to the realities of the world to take that into consideration when publishing or airing a news item. I think this is the argument Bob was making in his piece and he could very well be right. But from a perspective that I hope is as dispassionate as it can be, the question of fairness and paternalism again comes up: Is it the job of a journalistic organization to favor one group over another or to treat one group differently in their coverage — to show it special dispensation or handle it with kid gloves not applied when dealing with anyone else?

One final thing before we hopefully put what I think has been a healthy debate to rest: By talking about this issue I want to make it clear that I’m not at all personally outraged about the double-standard in black-vs.-white press coverage nor am I crying that I’m being racially persecuted, as O’Reilly and Goldberg most certainly were. I’m a white guy living in the United States of America — I’ve got it fucking great. I’m merely pointing out that the double-standard exists and that there’s a very strong argument to be made that it does actually defy the rules of a responsible and unbiased press. Am I hedging a little because of the sensitive nature of this subject — wearing those kid gloves, as it were? Sure am. Is it somewhat cowardly to allow any kind of potential pressure or backlash to influence what I say or the way I say it? Perhaps.

But that was sort of the point I was initially making. Or at the very least, the question I was asking.

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By Bob Cesca: Last week, my friend and podcast partner Chez Pazienza wrote a piece for The Daily Banter about a case involving several African American youths in Norfolk, Virginia who allegedly beat up a pair of reporters from The Virginian-Pilot newspaper, Dave Forster and Marjon Rostami. Forster happens to be white and Rostami is Iranian. I hastened to mention the races of everyone involved because it applies to the rest of the story. The incident went largely unnoticed in the press, mainly because The Virginian-Pilot only published news of the incident in the form of a opinion piece, written by Michelle Washington two weeks later. There’s another reason it wasn’t covered by the Pilot, and I’ll get to that shortly.

Washington’s opinion piece reached Matt Drudge’s yellow-journalism desk and BOOM! Drudge posted a link to the op/ed with the predictably misleading headline: “100 Black Teens Beat White Couple in Norfolk… Media Bury Attack.” Every angry right-winger looking for an excuse for their ridiculous false equivalences about white racism versus “black racism” had a brand new hobby horse to ride. On Fox News Channel, Bill O’Reilly issued one of his personal jihads against The Virginian-Pilot, sending his creepy stalking danger-boy, Jesse Watters to Virginia to accost the editor of the paper, Denis Finley, and find out why he was obviously helping to oppress the white majority. Why would the newspaper wait for so long before publishing the story? Why won’t this newspaper get its boot off the neck of white people?! Why does the news media hate white people?! I’m paraphrasing, of course. But that was the subtext of O’Reilly’s segments.

During one segment, O’Reilly and contributor Bernard Goldberg, in a fantastically propagandized illustration of the wealthy white majority playing the oppressed victim, lamented what they considered to be a journalistic “double-standard.” The Trayvon Martin case, a white-on-black crime, received and continues to receive ample media attention while the reportedly black-on-white Forster/Rostami case was only given an initial opinion page write-up two weeks later (there have since been numerous stories about the assault).

Chez, in his column here, defended Bill O’Reilly and Fox News Channel for saying that there’s a double-standard at play: on one hand the press and, specifically, cable news continues to be outraged by the Trayvon Martin case, while, on the other hand, the The Virginian-Pilot case didn’t receive any attention at all, thus ignoring a black-on-white crime and illustrating some sort of double-standard epidemic. (I should note here that this column isn’t necessarily a refutation of Chez’s piece. Consider this another point of view on double-standards.)

In a way, both O’Reilly and Chez are correct. In a way. There’s absolutely a double-standard because the crimes — the Trayvon Martin case and the Forster/Rostami case — are vastly different in almost every way and should, therefore, be treated with vastly different coverage. They’re different in terms of outcome, they’re different in terms of details and each have very different historical and contemporaneous contexts.

The truth is, not every white-on-black crime is given Trayvon Martin-level coverage. Not by a long shot. So why was there so much outrage swirling around Trayvon?

Let’s do the list.

First, Trayvon was a kid walking through a white neighborhood armed with nothing but snacks. Second, Trayvon was shot and killed — possibly hit in the back, indicating that he was running away rather than confronting Zimmerman. Third, and most suspiciously, law enforcement released George Zimmerman without charging him with any crimes, and Zimmerman was allowed to keep his firearm. Fourth, there’s a sinister gun violence meets gun control meets NRA component here. Fifth, there appeared to be details that the Sanford police were withholding from the public, making it seem like yet another example of whites covering-up a white-on-black crime. Sixth, there’s evidence of racial profiling by Zimmerman. And finally, and most importantly, the historical context is far more complicated when it comes to white-on-black crime, as well as the white presumption of African American guilt when the racial roles are reversed. More on that presently.

Meanwhile in Virginia, even though the attack was clearly traumatic for Foster and Rostami, they weren’t hospitalized nor did they receive medical treatment for their minor injuries. There’s no evidence of racial profiling — in other words, there’s no evidence that the attack was racially motivated and it probably wouldn’t have happened at all if Forster hadn’t jumped out of his car to confront the youths. Even though a rock hit Forster’s car window, the window doesn’t appear to have been shattered. And the police have already arrested a kid for throwing the rock, while there are warrants out for another assailant. Again, while traumatic, it’s a far cry from the ugliness and inexplicable mysteries of the Trayvon case. No potential cover-ups. No fatalities. No serious injuries. The initial characterization by Michelle Washington and Drudge that “hundreds” of black teens wantonly beat a white couple (only “a handful” were involved), hospitalizing them, while their car was “trashed” appears to be highly exaggerated because, if true, the injuries wouldn’t be nearly as minor and, as it turns out, the reporters drove their own vehicle home that night and voluntarily declined to be named in a news story. Police chief Sharon Chamberlin said, “This is a situation where you had a whole bunch of [movie theater] events let out all at once, you had a lot of people on the street, you had an assault occur and that was isolated with a small number of people.” So another major question here: is this even newsworthy? Perhaps it would be in a small town police-scanner rag, but Norfolk is not a small town.

Chez wrote: “O’Reilly may be a pompous buffoon, but I dare anyone to challenge his assertion that were the races reversed in the case in Virginia — had it been a group of white people who attacked an African-American man and woman in their car — it would’ve been the lead on Al Sharpton’s MSNBC show every night since the day it happened.”

Given the details and the minor “simple assault” nature of the fracas, and contrary to what Chez wrote in support of O’Reilly, it’s questionable whether Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson would care about it at all. It’s a relatively nothing case, especially contrasted against the gory details of the Trayvon Martin shooting.

So to compare the Forster/Rostami case with the Trayvon Martin case is a glaringly false equivalence and two different standards of judgment have to be applied.

But let’s say, yes, if the incident in Norfolk had been more serious, maybe with a fatality, and let’s say the races had been reversed — a group of whites fatally attacking an African American couple — the coverage would probably have been appropriately huge. And here’s why. In addition to the hypothetically fatal crime itself, there’s a considerably wicked history in America of white racism, oppression and violence against black people, which, to an extent, continues today. It’s the historical and contemporaneous context that ultimately changes how these stories are, and should be, covered.

Blacks are thirteen percent of the American population — therefore members of the minority race beating up two members of the majority race is quite different in a societal sense than a member of the majority race shooting the minority race in apparent cold blood. White-on-black crime comes from a position of power. The opposite — the minority oppressing the majority — is impossible.

Beyond the demographics, and beyond the oppression, or even the stripping of cultural identity and the enslavement of African Americans prior to the Civil War, the last 150 years have witnessed countless examples of blacks being villainized, oppressed, lynched, tortured and segregated by white people. Even after the slaves were freed, the effort to reconstruct the nation led to the North and South agreeing upon a common enemy to blame for the war and the subsequent hardships it caused: blacks became a national scapegoat as society embraced the Lost Cause Mythology and the absolution of the South for seceding. Blacks, they said, were responsible for 600,000 dead Americans; blacks nearly destroyed the nation; blacks began to seek power over white people, so they had to be held down and persecuted. They were portrayed in pop culture — silent films, minstrel shows and cartoons — as lazy, shiftless rapists. Soon, neo-slavery cropped up in the south whereby blacks could be arrested for nonsense crimes like “vagrancy” — being unemployed, basically — then disappeared and sold into secret chain gangs dotting the countryside where they would live out their lives without trial or connection to their families. Jim Crow laws, prevalent into the 1960s, and even modern purges of voter registration lists in Florida and elsewhere have disenfranchised blacks and relegated them to second class citizens. Harassment, lynchings and beatings from mobs of white people in white hoods forced blacks to live in fear and inferiority. Law enforcement and the judicial system was stacked against blacks, and when this system wasn’t selling blacks into neo-slavery, it was sending large numbers of blacks to prison and the electric chair. Even today, the Republican Party engages in Southern Strategy politics — demonizing blacks in order to motivate angry white voters, not unlike what Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly and others often do to pump up their ratings.

Additionally, when corporations, industry and jobs bugged out of the cities for the suburbs, and, eventually, for cheap labor overseas, corporate abandonment left our urban centers stranded and without anywhere to turn for legitimate work. City housing and education crumbled, money was scarce and, regardless of the ethnic group, drugs and gangs began to spring up out of a sense of despair and desperation. And, once again, urban blacks were immediately blamed for the crime and the blight indicative of joblessness and desperation, even though it was the loss of jobs and industry that poisoned American cities. Now, with the exception of some efforts at gentrification, cities remain in constant turmoil which has only been exacerbated by the financial crisis. By the way, white conservatives have tried to blame black people for the recession, too — all of those easy mortgages handed out like candy and squandered by blacks who couldn’t afford the payments.

These injustices are the context for the activist-perception and reporting of crimes like the Trayvon Martin killing and it only just begins to explain why there was such outrage generated around those proceedings. The Trayvon shooting and the handling of the case by law enforcement smelled all too familiar, and the past must not be repeated here. And so a line was drawn in the sand by activists and media personalities. Not again. Not now.

To be clear, none of these historical realities exculpates the crimes committed in Norfolk or Sanford or wherever. A crime is a crime and the people responsible for attacking Forster and Rostami should be arrested and charged (one person is already in custody). But this exhaustively lengthy context begins to explain why the crimes occur and how/why they’re covered. If the press is a little tentative about covering black-on-white crime, especially when it’s a minor non-fatal assault like the Forster/Rostami case, we can begin to understand why with the proper background. We can also understand, given all of these reasons, why a white-on-black crime might harken back to any of the countless atrocities committed against blacks by the white-dominated American power structure and, subsequently, we can also understand why African American activists like Al Sharpton and others are outraged when it happens. It makes complete sense given the prologue of the past.

Yes, there’s a double-standard. And until there’s full equality and the long slow process of racial healing is completed, the double-standard has to remain.

As for the media allegedly ignoring what appear to be black-on-white crimes, ask anyone associated with the coverage of the O.J. Simpson case if that’s true.

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Was the loathsome Bernie Goldberg right?

By Chez Pazienza: Every once in a while I apparently like to see to it that my progressive street cred takes a huge hit and, well, I guess it’s that time again. The line to angrily show me the error of my ways forms to the left — just, please, not the face, eh?

In case you haven’t been watching Bill O’Reilly’s show on Fox recently — and I can’t in good conscience suggest that you do — his latest indignant crusade involves the search for answers in the beating of a pair of Virginia newspaper reporters by an angry mob a few weeks back. The two reporters were white; the people who attacked them, throwing rocks at their car and eventually sending both of them to the hospital, were reportedly all black. What got O’Reilly’s dander up was the fact that the paper the victims work for — the Virginian-Pilot — ran the story not as a news item but as an opinion piece two weeks after the attack. It never bothered to report the initial story; it only chose to comment on it well after the fact and when it did, it stated only that the reporters were beaten by a mob, with no mention of what seemed to be a glaringly obvious racial component. O’Reilly even sent his own little Renfield, intrepid professional asshole producer Jesse Watters, down to the Pilot’s offices to confront the paper’s management about what he sees as an intentional oversight and ran an interview with at least one man in the neighborhood where the attack happened who claimed that anger over the Trayvon Martin killing in Florida might have played a role in the beating.

To top it all off, a couple of nights ago O’Reilly brought on Bernard Goldberg — who by the way is probably the most impressive surrogate for Fox’s audience of embittered old white people from among its stable of regular guests — to discuss how liberal media bias contributed to the unwillingness to broach the subject of race in the story. From Mediaite, here’s what Goldberg had to say:

“Here is what it is really about. It goes beyond journalism, it’s a much bigger issue. It’s about white, usually white liberal paternalism where they say, ‘Well, we really can’t hold black people up to the same standards as we hold white people up to. That’s why we are not putting it in the paper. They are different.’ So two things happen after that. One, the newspaper, the media, they don’t want to air that kind of dirty laundry because it’s kind of embarrassing for the black community. And two, they don’t want to give ammunition to the bigots who probably would say, you see, that’s how they all behave. Now look, we hate, we detest the bigots. But a newspaper has a responsibility to cover legitimate news.”

O’Reilly himself then went on to bring up what he calls an undeniable double standard when it comes to the coverage of the Virginia attack: “You can’t tell me that MSNBC, if it were reversed, wouldn’t be every show, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, on and on and on,” he said.

Now make no mistake: Bill O’Reilly isn’t the least bit concerned with justice, fairness or, most assuredly, journalistic integrity — he’s just throwing red meat to his viewers to feed their white resentment, persecution complexes and the overall delusion that they’re the victims of “reverse racism.” Here’s the thing, though: He’s right about this. And so is Bernie Goldberg. Intentions be damned, almost across the board they’re both right.

Was flat-out racism really a factor in the decision by a large group of black people to attack the Virginian-Pilot’s two white reporters as they sat in their car at a red light? I don’t know, and neither does anyone else at the moment. But to not acknowledge at all the racial component of a story like this requires powers of self-deception — or at the very least the ability to twist yourself into a pretzel of rationalization — that border on superhuman. Again, no one should be claiming that race played a role in the attack, but it’s entirely fair to ask the question why so few in the media are willing to question whether it did — and to do it seemingly as part of a general rule about bringing up race when it’s a black-on-white crime. O’Reilly may be a pompous buffoon, but I dare anyone to challenge his assertion that were the races reversed in the case in Virginia — had it been a group of white people who attacked an African-American man and woman in their car — it would’ve been the lead on Al Sharpton’s MSNBC show every night since the day it happened.

I want to stress one more time, because it’s that important: I have no idea whether race played a role in this recent attack and I won’t immediately jump to the conclusion that it did. But it’s a news outlet’s job to dispassionately report the facts, even if it’s to impress upon the public that not enough is known about a news item to make a judgment call. But the press generally doesn’t do that when it comes to issues of race and violence, not when the victim is white and the assailant is black. As Goldberg says, they’re holding the two groups to different standards when it comes to what they’re willing to say about them without unequivocal evidence. When a power-drunk white guy in Florida shoots an unarmed black teen, it’s asked whether the attack was racially motivated. And it should be. When an angry mob of young black men and women attack a couple of white reporters, trashing their car and sending them to the hospital, the possibility that the attack was racially motivated isn’t even discussed, out of fear of offending anyone or fueling an ugly stereotype. And, again, it should be.

Why? Because that’s a news outlet’s job.

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By Chez Pazienza: It was pretty much a foregone conclusion that somebody at NBC was going to lose a job over the galactic fuck-up that led to a severely edited 911 call from Trayvon Martin shooter George Zimmerman making air. Well, late last week NBC — after undertaking what it called a painstaking internal investigation — canned a Miami-based producer, specifically the producer who edited the call. For those who haven’t been paying close attention, the Today show ran the clip, which featured George Zimmerman seeming to suggest, without prompting, that Trayvon Martin was suspicious because he was black: “This guy looks like he’s up to no good; he looks black,” Zimmerman said in the recording. The problem is that the dispatcher askedZimmerman for a description of Martin, leading to his statement that the teenager looked black — only that part inexplicably got cut from the tape. It took all of about ten seconds for the Breitbart empire of non-journalistic shit and pencil-neck twerp Brent Bozell’s Media Research Center to pounce on NBC for what they believed was a willful attempt by the network to inflame racial tension and further besmirch the good name of George Zimmerman.

Not NBC's finest moment

In response, NBC did a lot of public hand-wringing — much of it prompted not by outside pressure but by the fact that there are in fact quite a few excellent journalists within the halls of 30 Rock who take their ethics very seriously — culminating in the firing of the person at the very bottom of the scandal. Sure, he or she screwed up big time, but the question remains as to why so many checks and balances failed and so many managers missed a cataclysmic mistake like a false and potentially inflammatory edit in such a sensitive story. Needless to say, none of those managers has lost his or her job — and NBC News President Steve Capus in particular gets to order an underling to do the beheading of the lowly ranger while escaping King Ned Stark’s eventual fate himself.

Having worked in one newsroom or another for years, and at NBC in particular for most of my career, I’ve witnessed firsthand the kind of tunnel vision and focused group-think that can lead to a mistake like this being made. I’ve watched huge errors somehow go unnoticed by every single person in the room — mistakes simply slip through the cracks. No system is foolproof, particularly not when that system is designed to function at full capacity 24/7; people make the machine run, and those people are human — they screw up. That said, heads do need to roll when a screw-up of this magnitude is allowed to occur. And when I say heads, I mean heads — plural. It was certainly the individual producer’s responsibility to cut the clip so that it told the story correctly, but there ostensibly should’ve been at least a few people over his or her pay grade who are allowed in the building specifically to double-check people’s work. And those people fucked up as well. I obviously wasn’t privy to results of NBC’s “internal investigation,” but I find it hard to believe that a clip went from the hands of a Miami-based producer directly to the Today show’s air without ever running a gauntlet of proofs.

The X-factor in all of this, though — the very reason conservative watchdog groups were kind of within their right to pounce and question whether the edit really was an innocent mistake — is NBC’s ongoing affair with Al Sharpton. It’s no secret that those members of the rank and file at NBC who bristle at the thought that a misleading piece can make air are really irked that their bosses continue to see nothing wrong with diminishing NBC’s already tarnished reputation by allowing one of MSNBC’s anchors to play the part of an activist in a story he’s covering nightly. NBC always knew something like this was coming; in fact, there’s an argument to be made that it was banking, literally and figuratively, on Sharpton’s adamantium-hulled ego supplanting any sense of journalistic ethics he may have at the first sign of a race-related story he could insert himself into. NBC was well aware from the start what it was getting itself into by getting into bed with Sharpton, and he should’ve always been treated as off-limits — not simply because of his history of horseshit shenanigans but because he can’t string three words together without tripping over his own tongue and any space made for him was a space not made for a real journalist. As long as NBC allows Sharpton to pull double duty as host and advocate, it’s going to face criticism and its product will be looked at with suspicion.

One more thing: On that note, and in NBC’s defense, it’s worth mentioning the obvious difference between a network like NBC and, say, Fox News. Maybe the outside pressure did have something to do with the peacock’s quick and decisive reaction to this little scandal, but imagine for a moment if it had been Fox that aired a misleading piece of video — one that would have some accusing the network of intentionally attempting to deceive the public. Imagine how Fox would’ve almost certainly reacted. How it’s reacted in the past. It wouldn’t have given a shit what anybody thought. There would’ve been no internal investigation. No transparent hand-wringing. No one would’ve been fired. Fox would’ve circled the wagons and told everybody outside to piss off.

NBC may have made a mistake — and maybe it hasn’t taken enough action in the wake of it — but there are enough people inside 30 Rock who care that their work is taken seriously and who worry about whether they’re operating in an ethical manner that they at least give a damn about trying to correct the problem.

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The mayor of the city where Trayvon Martin was killed says he overruled police and prosecutors who opposed the release of tapes of 911 calls, telling them: “We’re not here to hide anything.”

Jeff Triplett, who is a senior vice president at United Legacy Bank and part-time mayor of Sanford, said he took the decision after Martin’s family asked for the release of recordings of a call that shooter George Zimmerman made to police and 911 calls from neighbors who heard the confrontation.

Police, prosecutors and the city attorney opposed releasing the calls because of the ongoing investigation, Triplett told Reuters.

“Everyone was saying to me, no, no, no, don’t turn them over,” he said. “I just continually asked, ‘Why wouldn’t we do this?’”

“I made that call to try to settle everything down a little bit, to let the family hear what transpired. We were being accused of a lot of things, or the police department was, so we can take the step to say, ‘We’re not here to hide anything,’” Triplett added.
Triplett was governs a population of about 54,000, 30 percent of whom are black and have long complained bitterly about police mistreatment.

“I ran for office to make a better Sanford. And this comes on your plate, and it’s just amazing,” 43-year-old Triplett told Reuters in an interview.

“The decisions I’m trying to make, I could be not only held accountable for them from the city side but from the nation and the world that’s watching right now,” he added.

Read more at MSNBC.com

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Spike Lee - Criminally Culpable for Tweeting Address of Zimmerman

By Ben Cohen: I like Spike Lee’s movies, and I generally respect Spike Lee. He sometimes wades in on sensitive race issues with thoughtless and questionable comments, but his intelligence, talent and willingness to challenge conventional stereotypes with art has, I believe, had a positive impact on debate in America. His contribution to the film industry and American culture is immense and he is rightfully regarded as an icon.

While Lee has put his foot in his mouth on occasion, he has behaved disgracefully over the killing of Trayvon Martin, re-tweeting the supposed address of the accused killer George Zimmerman. Lee got the address wrong and an elderly couple was forced to evacuate their home due to threats and continuous harassment.

For some reason, the media seems to be focusing on the fact that an innocent couple were caught up in the cross fire. This is of course, awful, and Lee is criminally culpable for putting them at risk. But worse is the fact that Lee took it upon himself to advertise the address of Zimmerman – a man who by law is innocent until proven guilty.

I have written on this topic recently, expressing sympathy for the family of Martin and the anger shown by the public. However, I don’t know all the facts behind the killing and refuse to judge Zimmerman until all the evidence has been presented. We have been overwhelmed with the narrative defending Martin, and heard far less from the other side. As it stands, I am extremely skeptical of Zimmerman’s version of events, but that could change as more evidence emerges.

The public is right to be outraged over the fact that Zimmerman was let go after he was arrested, but inciting mobs to go to his house is not the way to go about rectifying the situation. Someone could have been seriously hurt, or perhaps worse, and Spike Lee would have been liable for any crime committed against Zimmerman or whoever lived at the address he tweeted.

There should be a campaign to make sure the police properly investigate the killing of Trayvon Martin, and it should be done through peaceful protest and legal action. Spike Lee has cheapened the attempt to uncover the truth behind the tragic killing, and he should be ashamed of himself.

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By Chez Pazienza: All it took was one retweet for the wrath of God to rain down on me.

Last Friday morning I did what a lot of hacky self-proclaimed online pundits were doing in the wake of Geraldo Rivera’s galactically stupid claim that the choice to wear a hoodie is what got Trayvon Martin killed: I penned a quickie column on it for my blog.Like a lot of other ostensible progressives, however, I apparently had the bad form to not heap what I would soon learn was the universally agreed upon level of scornful indignation in Geraldo’s direction. On the contrary, while I said that Geraldo’s idiotic no-hoodie plea to American parents of brown kids was just that, idiotic, I argued that he did manage to touch on a larger issue that deserved at least some consideration. That issue is the role that someone’s wardrobe or style choices play in how that person is perceived by a large portion of the public. My point was that while I’m pretty sure Geraldo was wrong about Trayvon Martin’s hoodie having anything to do with George Zimmerman’s decision to confront and ultimately kill him, it’s common sense to note that what a person chooses to wear or adorn him or herself with influences how he or she is viewed. It may be unfair that people create preconceptions based on personal style, but that doesn’t matter one bit because that’s the way it is — and what this means is that while someone is free to wear whatever the hell he or she wants, that person has to understand that there may be unintended consequences to choosing to dress or look a certain way.

Did Geraldo Rivera have a point?

Now obviously I wasn’t saying that a kid in a hoodie deserves to be shot at for looking a little like the people Geraldo sees in stick-up surveillance videos all the time. Nor was I saying that a woman in a short skirt and high heels at a bar is asking to be sexually assaulted. I was simply arguing that while in a perfect world no one would jump to conclusions based on the way we choose to present ourselves — the key word is choice, as I’m not talking about physical characteristics that one is born with and which can’t be changed and therefore shouldn’t be judged at all on — we don’t live in a perfect world. Shouting about how a black or brown guy in a hoodie, low-slung pants and a ball cap should be able to walk the streets and not worry that people will look at him like he’s a thug and a threat is a ridiculous conceit because if you argue almost anything from the point of what should be, the whole argument becomes moot. I should be able to fly — but that’s not going to provide much consolation when I hit the sidewalk at 200 miles-an-hour. Until someone comes along and changes the reality of the situation and allows me to soar over the city, I’m gonna fall. Until someone changes perception — and I’m all for that — that perception will likely remain, and it borders on irresponsible not to be cognizant of it. Wanna buck convention? Have at it. Just understand that convention exists.

So, yeah, I dared to enter the Hysterical Indignation Vortex in the wake of the tragic and very likely criminal shooting of Trayvon Martin without expressing enough indignation to make the liberal masses happy. I know this because about ten seconds after my piece got tweeted out — admittedly by me, so I know that I get what I deserve — it was retweeted again and again and suddenly every friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend or nobody-in-particular with a Twitter account and a somewhat justifiable sense of outrage at the death of Trayvon was pounding on my digital door, ready to publicly flog me for my impertinence while basically misunderstanding every goddamned thing I’d said. Some of those raking me over the coals, in fact, admitted that they found my entire premise so “repellant” that they didn’t even bother to read the piece all the way through — not surprising given both our 140-character attention spans and blinded-by-passion discourse these days, but still a lousy way to come out on top in a debate.

And it was all of this that got me thinking about Bill Maher. Namely, that he’s right.

Last week, Maher penned an op-ed in the New York Times taking aim at how we as a culture have elevated controversy — the creation of it, often by the media, and instantaneous public response to it — to almost slapstick-comical levels. It feels like we now live to be pissed off and offended — at something, at everything, at anything — and to voice that outrage in whichever direction the perceived slight is coming from until the cause of our collective torment is beaten into submission. We don’t just disagree anymore — we want to make the thing we disagree with go away. The fury comes from both sides of the political aisle and from every stripe within our society. Maher’s assertion is that we need to learn how to get the hell over things and get on with our lives — to not immediately demand an apology every time we feel that someone has publicly offended us and to not be so quick to be offended in the first place. To those accused of saying or doing something that draws a coordinated public tantrum, his advice is simple: stop apologizing.

It pretty much goes without saying that, in a wonderfully ironic meta twist befitting the current fucked-up state of our culture, Maher’s column was debated at length in the media and throughout the social networking universe in the days after it was published. In other words, it drew controversy.

In the end, though, Maher’s right. Yes, there are a few notable exceptions to the Law of Unintended Controversy. There are times when someone can violate the standards of so many people so egregiously that a proportional public backlash is understandable. The problem is that it’s threatening to get to the point where it’s impossible to discern what is and isn’t a truly heinous and unacceptable affront because the machinery of indignation seems to wind up to the same deafening level for every perceived insult. As Jon Stewart once said brilliantly, “If we amplify everything, we hear nothing.” If we react — or some large swath of us reacts — with the same fervor each time we feel like we’ve been offended, the truly offensive crap gets lost in the echo chamber.

And who decides what’s truly offensive, anyway? I get that the democratization of the media means, in theory, that only the people who are pissed off at a given slight will react and make their voices heard, but have you listened to what it’s like out there lately? After a while it all gets Cuisinarted into one dull roar — and it’s exhausting.

I’m certainly not whining about the fact that a lot of those who seem to be perpetually aggrieved unleashed their fury on me on Twitter. I put myself out there so I’m, ironically, given the nature of the subject I was writing about, asking for it. I’m also certainly not decrying social media like some antediluvian royal dismissing change from on-high. Far from it.

The point is simply that, as Bill Maher writes, if we constantly attempt to crucify those who offend our sensibilities, what we’ll inevitably be left with is a truly PC-beholden culture where no one ever says or does anything interesting. Where no one pushes boundaries. Where no one challenges us. In other words, a place where none of us, I would hope, wants to live.

We have to be able to debate and discuss without trying to decimate those who oppose us — or those who we immediately assume oppose us.

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Nobody knows what really happened during the tragic shooting of black teenager Trayvon Martin in Florida last month. As the facts stand, it doesn’t look too good for the shooter, George Zimmerman. Martin was unarmed and was on the phone to his girlfriend at the time of the shooting, apparently telling her he was being followed. Zimmerman has a troubling criminal history that includes an arrest for assaulting a police officer, an accusation of domestic violence, and a restraining order filed against him by his ex girlfriend.  Martin on the other hand, had no criminal record, was a good student and was regarded as gentle by everyone who knew him.

Zimmerman should of course be presumed innocent, but the national outcry over his release is certainly understandable given the context of the killing.

Throughout the history of the United States, countless African Americans have been illegally killed by law enforcement officers and people in positions of authority. In Miami alone, 7 African Americans have been shot and killed this year by police, with several being unarmed and posing no immediate threat to the public. Nobody will ever forget the killing of African immigrant Amadou Diallo, who was shot 41 times by NYPD officers in 1999, or the unarmed Oscar Grant shot at point blank range in Oakland in 2009 by BART officer Johannes Mehserle. The fact is, the killing of unarmed black men in America is a common occurrence, and the resentment felt by the African American community towards the police is not only understandable, but justified.

President Obama spoke eloquently about the killing of Trayvon, saying ‘If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon’. Obama continued; ‘I think [Trayvon's parents] are right to expect that all of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves, and we are going to get to the bottom of exactly what happened.”

Sadly, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum have decided to play the pathetic ‘White male minority’ card used by Republicans to appeal to their base. Gingrich stated that Obama’s comments were “disgraceful” and that “Any young American of any ethnic background should be safe, period. We should all be horrified, no matter what the ethnic background. Is the president suggesting that, if it had been a white who’d been shot, that would be OK, because it wouldn’t look like him? That’s just nonsense.”

Santorum chimed in stating that Obama should “Not use these types of horrible and tragic individual cases to try to drive a wedge in America.”

Obama of course, was doing nothing of the sort. The President was simply articulating what the African American community often feels – that people who look just like them seem to get shot all the time. This isn’t prejudging a situation or implying that white people aren’t killed unjustifiably – Obama was only showing empathy to parents of a dead child killed in extremely suspicious circumstances.

Politicians like Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum like to pretend the racism doesn’t exist in America, that the playing field is level and African Americans are poor or shot by the police because they deserve it. While study after study after study confirm that poverty and racism are structural and cyclical, rich white men often cannot, or do not want to understand that their society produces these phenomenon. Why? Because their society also produces people like them – rich and untouchable. Perhaps if Gingrich or Santorum were unable to hail taxis due to their skin color, or targeted by the police for no other reason than their ethnic background, they might show some understanding when it comes to unarmed black teenagers shot for no apparent reason.

Instead, both politicians have decided to cash in on another delicate moment in US racial history, coming down on the side of the powerful instead the victims. According to Gingrich and Santorum, expressing sympathy for minorities is akin to racism – a mind boggling leap of logic only possible in today’s Republican party.

Sadly, that is the story of GOP party politics; it is dominated by those who ignore reality and focus on a world that does not exist – one where there is no racism and no inequality. Republicans cannot address the real problems facing the average Americans because by enlarge, they are not average Americans.

And that is why when it comes to the killing of Trayvon Martin, Obama was right to express how troubled he was, and again, the leading Republicans were completely wrong.

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