News

The real story in the Trayvon Martin George Zimmerman trial is media bias

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Here’s an excellent article by John Nolte on Breitbart that documents the mainstream media’s efforts to make a crisis out of an open-and-shut case of self-defense.

Here are a few of the distortions from the mainstream media: (links removed)

March 21, 2012 – CNN Falsely Accuses Zimmerman of Saying “#censoredByWK#”

Knowing full well the phony racial storm brewing around the Zimmerman case was about to have gasoline thrown on it the next day, CNN went to extraordinary lengths to claim Zimmerman had uttered the racial slur “#censoredByWK#” when he had not.

This has to be watched to be believed.

CNN wouldn’t officially retract their defamation until April 5th, long after it was too late.

March 27, 2012 – NBC News Edits 911 Audio to Make Zimmerman Look Racist

On the storied Today Show, NBC News told America Zimmerman said this on the 911 call:

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

When the truth is that the unedited audio actually went like this:

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: Okay. And this guy, is he white, black, or Hispanic?

ZIMMERMAN: He looks black.

After the fraudulent editing was discovered by the New Media (first by Breitbart News), former NBC News president Steve Capus would claim that the edit was “a mistake and not a deliberate act to misrepresent the phone call.”

Eventually, several NBC producers would be fired (without being named), and Zimmerman would file a lawsuit against NBC; it remains unresolved.

March 28, 2012 – ABC News Falsely Claims Zimmerman Wasn’t Injured Night of Shooting

The day after NBC News released its falsified 911 bombshell, ABC News released a phony, hyped-up story of its own. Using grainy surveillance video of Zimmerman at the police station on the night of the shooting, ABC News claimed, “A police surveillance video taken the night that Trayvon Martin was shot dead shows no blood or bruises on George Zimmerman.”

Obviously, if true, this would go a long way towards proving Zimmerman was not in fear of his life the night of the shooting and had lied about being beaten up.

The only problem is that the ABC News story was not true — not even close. The network didn’t bother to enhance the video before breaking the news. Had they, Zimmerman’sbloody head would have been quite apparent.

It would take four days for ABC to retract its falsehood.

Now just compare the biased coverage of the Zimmerman case with the non-coverage of the Gosnell case, where a black abortionist was murdering unborn and born children left, right and center for years.

As John Lott argued, there should not even have been a trial:

The case was so weak that the local Sanford District Attorney refused to bring charges against Zimmerman. That is why, on the orders of the governor, an outside District Attorney, Angela Corey, had to be brought in to handle it.

Sanford Police Chief Bill Lee was fired because he also refused to charge Zimmerman with a crime.

Even the lead detective on the case, Christopher Serino, told the jury he believed Zimmerman’s version of the events.

If the media was really concerned about violence against blacks, then they would be concerned about black-on-black violence.

Look at this article from the leftist UK  Guardian.

Excerpt:

Startling statistics reveal that between 1980-2008, African-Americans were six times more likely than whites to be victims of gun violence and seven times more likely to kill with guns than whites, according to the Justice Department. African-Americans represent a mere 13% of the US population yet more than 50% of federal prisoners are black. You can claim racial bias in the judicial system, but that doesn’t explain all of it.

Why aren’t so-called black leaders outraged and marching over the recent shooting rampage in Chicago. During the 4 July holiday weekend, including the Wednesday leading up to it, 62 people were wounded by gun violence in Chicago and 12 others killed. The holiday shooting spree raised Chicago’s homicide tally to 200 for the year. Last year about 500 people were killed, and most of those killing and being killed in Chicago are black. According to the Chicago Tribune, “blacks make up about 33% of the city’s population, they accounted for nearly 78% of the homicide victims through the first six months of 2012”.

With the mainstream media’s national attention on the Zimmerman murder trail, I think it’s stunning that scant, if any, attention was given to the violence raging in Chicago or other cities across the country. As I’ve said many times during this case, Americans, especially black Americans, have come to accept blacks killing other blacks as normal.

Why does the mainstream media have nothing to say about that? Why does the black community have nothing to say about that? The real cause of violent crime is fatherlessness, but the left is in favor of promoting and subsidizing fatherlessness, so they’re not going to say a word against it. Single mothers are one of the left’s main constituencies come election time. It’s disgusting that they want to prop up single mothers who make poor choices with men. Not to mention protecting the failed public school system and attacking vouchers that would help black children out of poverty. And not to mention the epidemic of abortion in the black community. Children deserve better than abortion, public schools and fatherlessness. But to help children, we have to start being honest about the causes of their real problems.

By the way, I have to point out that I am not white. I have brown skin. I have darker skin that Barack Obama. But unlike the mainstream media, when I see evil, I call it evil, regardless of people’s skin color. The mainstream media is not interested in telling the truth. They are interested in creating divisions based on skin color. They are the real racists. They are the real destroyers.

This was nothing but a circus of media bias. See this related post for academic studies that document left-wing media bias.

Commentary

Suzanne Venker on the decline of men and male roles

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Fox News editorial from a woman who defends men.

Excerpt:

In November of last year, I wrote an article for Fox News called The War on Men (which I subsequently expanded to an eBook). To keep it pithy, in the piece I focused on one effect of this war: the lack of marriageable men. But there’s so much more to it. The truth is, men have become second-class citizens.

The most obvious proof is male bashing in the media. It is rampant and irrefutable. From sit-coms and commercials that portray dad as an idiot to biased news reports about the state of American men, males are pounced on left and right. And that’s just the beginning.

She talks about the problems that boys face in feminized schools, and also in university, and then explains some of the reasons why men are shying away from marriage:

When men become husbands and fathers, things get really bad. In family courts throughout America, men are routinely stripped of their rights and due process. The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) is easily used against them since its definition of violence is so broad that virtually any conflict between partners can be considered abuse.

“If a woman gets angry for any reason, she can simply accuse a man and men are just assumed guilty in our society,” notes Dr. Helen Smith, author of the new book, “Men on Strike.” This is particularly heinous since, as Smith adds, violence in domestic relations “is almost 50% from men and 50% from women.”

Shocked? If so, that’s in part because the media don’t believe men can be victims of domestic violence—so they don’t report it. They would rather feed off stories that paint women as victims. And in so doing, they’ve convinced America there’s a war on women.

Yet it is males who suffer in our society. From boyhood through adulthood, the White American Male must fight his way through a litany of taunts, assumptions and grievances about his very existence. His oppression is unlike anything American women have faced. Unlike women, however, men don’t organize and form groups when they’ve been persecuted. They just bow out of the game.

America needs to wake up. We have swung the pendulum too far in the other direction—from a man’s world to a woman’s world.

That’s not equality. That’s revenge.

It’s not just the American White Male who sees these problems. I am an American Brown Male, and I have the same problems.

Is she right that men and women commit domestic violence equally? That’s not what we are told in school and in the media, but let’s look at the studies and see.

Studies on domestic violence

Let’s see what’s happening with domestic violence rates in the UK.

Excerpt:

Data from Home Office statistical bulletins and the British Crime Survey show that men made up about 40% of domestic violence victims each year between 2004-05 and 2008-09, the last year for which figures are available. In 2006-07 men made up 43.4% of all those who had suffered partner abuse in the previous year, which rose to 45.5% in 2007-08 but fell to 37.7% in 2008-09.

Similar or slightly larger numbers of men were subjected to severe force in an incident with their partner, according to the same documents. The figure stood at 48.6% in 2006-07, 48.3% the next year and 37.5% in 2008-09, Home Office statistics show.

The 2008-09 bulletin states: “More than one in four women (28%) and around one in six men (16%) had experienced domestic abuse since the age of 16. These figures are equivalent to an estimated 4.5 million female victims of domestic abuse and 2.6 million male victims.”

In addition, “6% of women and 4% of men reported having experienced domestic abuse in the past year, equivalent to an estimated one million female victims of domestic abuse and 600,000 male victims”.

And the numbers from the government of Canada are the same.

Canada numbers:

An estimated 7% of women and 6% of men in a current or previous spousal relationship encountered spousal violence during the five years up to and including 2004, according to a comprehensive new report on family violence.

So it’s pretty even. Women are about as likely to commit violence as men are. And in lesbian relationships, the rate of domestic violence is extremely high, from 17% to 45%, depending on the study. I think in general, women are more violent when there is no man present, because they have more difficulty restraining their emotions and resolving disagreements with rational arguments instead of fist, feet and weapons.

You also see higher rates of violence by mothers against their own children, than with fathers. Mothers are more than twice as likely to abuse children as fathers. Biological fathers are programmed to protect children – it’s the stepfathers and live-in boyfriends who harm children. In fact, one of the roles of the father in the marriage is to restrain the woman’s outbursts and anger so that the children are not harmed, and to protect them from threats from outside the home, too.

The negative perception of men deters men from marrying

I am very conscious of the perception that women have of men these days. Instead of looking to men for leadership, the presumption is that our role is to entertain women. And not to make judgments or claims of knowledge. The worst part is that most women don’t know and don’t care about how men are perceived today. I think that is the worst problem for me with wanting to get married. I just don’t believe that there are any women out there who are really looking for a husband in the traditional sense of the word, and with the traditional male roles. The negative perception of men and the way that women prefer men who are non-judgmental, non-religious and ignorant are two major reasons why I personally am cold about marriage.

Commentary

What motivates William Lane Craig and why is he so effective?

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Nathan Schneider, who wrote a balanced profile of Dr. Craig for the Chronicle of Higher Education a few weeks back, has written an even more in-depth profile of Christianity’s ablest defender.

Here’s the introduction:

Nobody—or just about nobody, depending on whom you ask—beats William Lane Craig in a debate about the existence of God, or the resurrection of Jesus, or any topic of that sort. During their debate at Notre Dame in April of last year, New Atheist author Sam Harris referred to Craig as “the one Christian apologist who seems to have put the fear of God into many of my fellow atheists.”

Over the course of working on my book about how people search for proof of God’s existence, I had the chance to spend a generous amount of time with Craig, both in the Atlanta area where he lives and at Biola University, an evangelical school on the outskirts of Los Angeles, where he teaches a few weeks out of the year. For the book, I’ve gotten to write about ideas like his “kalam cosmological argument,” one of the most-cited ideas of its generation in philosophy of religion, which fuses medieval Muslims with modern cosmology. I also tell of his entrepreneurial savvy in turning the Evangelical Philosophical Society into an academic organization that moonlights as a slick-as-a-banana apologetics platform for changing hearts like yours and mine. But none of that quite captures the man’s role as a sage and exemplar, in which he renders something like the upbuilding service Oprah provides to home-bound American women, except that his acolytes are the precocious set among conservative, evangelical, young-adult males. He makes me almost wish I were that kind of conservative evangelical myself—which is, to him, the point.

Craig dresses impeccably and professorially, often with a buttoned shirt and a patterned blazer, sweater, or sweater-vest. His dimples hint at a basic innocence that can be startling when it pokes through the frontage of logic. I find in Craig the decency associated with an era I am too young to be nostalgic for, and which I’ve been taught to imagine was imperialistic, sexist, homophobic, narrow-minded, or otherwise regressive. His rationalizations of certain parts of the Hebrew Bible can sound like he’s okay with genocide. Yet none of these accusations quite sticks to him; none is even comprehensible in the cosmic snow-globe within which he expertly thinks his way through life, whose sole and constant storyline is bringing more and more souls to a saving knowledge of the one true Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

I live in a different snow-globe from Craig’s. Nevertheless, I’ve gained a lot from the lessons I learned with him, and from his carefully crafted advice, and from his answers to my questions. (“I may not answer, but you can ask!” he once warned.) They’ve improved my productivity, and my relationship with loved ones, and my physical fitness. It would be selfish if I did not pass some of these lessons on, in synthesized and practicable form, to you.

The article covers 7 points about Dr. Craig:

  1. Do Everything Like It’s a Ministry
  2. Make a Covenant with Your Wife
  3. Organize the Day
  4. Turn Weakness into Strength
  5. Be Prepared
  6. Remember That Time Is Everything—and Nothing
  7. Love God and Authority

And here’s one that I found fascinating, being single myself:

3. Organize the Day

There was a time, says Craig, when he began to worry he was losing his knack for philosophy. “Honey,” he remembers telling Jan, “I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I just can’t seem to concentrate anymore. I used to be able to study all day long, and there was no problem, and now I find I just can’t concentrate anymore. My mind wanders, and I’m tired.” He was tempted to despair.

“No, no, don’t be ridiculous!” she told him. “You just need to organize your day.”

As usual, she was right. She put him on a new schedule: starting the workday with the hardest philosophical work in the morning, then lighter material, like his writing for popular audiences, after lunch. He doesn’t look at his email until late afternoon, “when my brain is really fried.” (For fear of being bombarded with mail, he doesn’t even share his email address with his graduate students.) Soon after trying this regime, he regained his philosophical powers completely.

The couple’s life together, at home in the suburbs of Atlanta, is a picture of (a certain kind of) teamwork. Craig wakes up each morning at 5:30, and begins the day with devotional time, reading from the Church Fathers and the New Testament in Greek, and then he prays for the spread of the gospel in some benighted part of the world, with the help of the Operation World handbook. Soon, Jan is up. They have coffee together (which he dislikes, but recommends for the health and social benefits), after which he goes down to the weight room for an hour of exercise. By the time he reemerges, she has a hot breakfast ready and waiting—sometimes as elaborate, he says, as ham and eggs and pumpkin waffles with whipped cream and strawberries. (“She’s a fabulous cook.”) He’ll return downstairs for an intensive morning of scholarship, and reemerge for the hot lunch Jan has prepared. Then, he’s back downstairs for the lighter work of the afternoon, culminating in emails, which he responds to in longhand and she has often been the one to type out and send, since his rare neuromuscular disease—more on that in a moment—renders him unable to type. Between meals and typing sessions, Jan plays the stock market. Before long dinner is ready, and they eat, and spend the evening together, watching TV and drinking red wine (which he also dislikes, but also recommends for the health and social benefits).

“She’s not an intellectual herself,” Craig says of his wife, “but she appreciates the value of what I do, and that’s what matters.” One would hope that this is true, because she has typed out all of his papers, books, and both doctoral dissertations. Would that we all had such devoted help, though it may be untenable in the present economic climate for those scholars among us unable to garner five-figure speaking fees. We can at least hold off on our email for a few hours—which I have since done, to enormous benefit.

It’s very interesting to read this because it’s got lots of positive and negative points. On the one hand, he finds Dr. Craig’s conservative beliefs and exclusive positions difficult to accept. On the other hand, he has to admit that Dr. Craig really believes what he says he believes, and he’s very good at persuading others. He’s done his homework. I think the biggest problem that a person has with accepting Christianity is re-orienting the will. Another big problem is being willing to be disapproved of by non-Christians. Even if they can’t beat you, the pressure to compromise and please others makes many people shy away from Christianity.

This new profile of Dr. Craig is getting tons of likes and shares on Facebook, so give it a look. Be sure and share it on Facebook and tweet it, too.

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