Seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot fatally by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman on February 26 as he walked, carrying Skittles and ice tea, toward his father’s girlfriend’s home in a gated community in Sanford, FL, a suburb of Orlando. This much we know (also, Skittles sales are up).
In the weeks since, the incident gained media prominence to the point of overtaking 2012 election coverage. Some of that reporting has been of the “he said-she said” variety, and some has been disputed (the Associated Press ran a piece last week pointing out ambiguities in the case). And pundits on all sides of the political spectrum have weighed in on everything from guns to US race relations.
But there has also been some solid shoe-leather reporting, on Florida pavement and elsewhere. The following is a guide to some of the better reports we’ve found:
Updating the facts
Of all the attempts at gathering information about the killing in one place, Mother Jones has done it particularly well, with an epically long, oft-updated explainer page. It’s a compendium of primary sources and reporting and (in a somewhat mixed blessing) also some opinion, organized in a question-and-answer format. It’s a great resource for tracking updates in both information and public reaction as they unfold. The Orlando Sentinel and the online site westorlandonews.com have also been devoting extensive resources to following the story.
The man behind the Mother Jones effort is Adam Weinstein, 33, Mother Jones’s national security reporter, who is based in Tallahassee and who, interestingly, has had a concealed weapon permit since he turned 21. Weinstein, with assists from DC-based colleagues, has been collecting primary sources and reporting and keeping abreast of other outlets’ coverage.
One useful innovation is a second page devoted solely to archiving primary sources—with the exception of the audio of 911 calls related to the case, which remain toward the top of the first page because of heavy demand.
But “within the first day or three of putting up an explainer,” Weinstein said, “you’re starting a conversation with commenters, readers, tweeters.” How it evolves “really depends on our readership, the attention people are paying to it, and what they want to know about the story.”
The reader-spurred updating leads to useful updates—at this point, 34 of them—but a page that, with the combined content and comments, becomes unwieldy. MoJo might consider making the updates available by topic as well as chronological order, since the additions aren’t always time-sensitive but, rather, reported responses to reader curiosity.
Weinstein said he’ll continue updating the explainer in the coming weeks, but that Mother Jones’s coverage of the Trayvon case will soon shift focus beyond the explainer monolith to long-form stories. “What we found is there’s a tipping point where it gets to be so large that what we do is we use the explainer as a forum,” Weinstein said. “Stories begin to need their own space.”
The police
A widespread perception exists at this point that, whatever happened between Martin and Zimmerman, the investigation of the Sanford Police Department was amateurish at best. The vote of no-confidence in Police Chief Bill Lee by the City Council certainly fostered that impression, as did the subsequent temporary removal of Lee from his post, and the recusal of state attorney Norman Wolfinger.
So we were surprised when, in a review of the coverage, we had a hard time turning up a comprehensive journalistic account of what the police actions actually were—and how they measured up to optimal (or even standard) police practices in the investigation of a suspicious death. Mother Jones’s Weinstein said last Friday that he, too, had not “yet found [a] big unified piece focusing on the Sanford police’s conduct.” (Update: but see here.)
The clearest crack at that story we did find is a good March 21 article by Frances Robles of The Miami Herald. Robles catalogues the leading criticisms of the department, tracks down police practices experts to weigh in, and gets on-the-record responses—some more persuasive than others—from the Sanford PD.
Well, the Columbia Journalism Review makes an heroic effort here to be objective but falls down slightly towards the end:
"That residents didn’t feel safe to move freely within their own gated community because an overzealous neighborhood watch captain is a tragic irony,"
I would strike the word "overzealous" as unsupported by the evidence and change the word "residents" to "at least one resident."
If we grade on the curve you get an A, since almost all other news sources have been much more biased than this.
#1 Posted by Luke Lea, CJR on Mon 2 Apr 2012 at 03:42 PM
Hmm. Where do I go to find good reporting on why this story is so much more important than the killings of those . . . nobodies . . . whose cases do not present an opportunity for bloviating chattering class people to make larger statements about American society than can be supported by, you know, reality? If CJR and Mother Jones are unaware that the greatest street threat to young African-American males is other young African males, or that interracial violence is decidedly more likely to feature this demographic as perpetrators, rather than as victims, I'd be happy to begin their education. I keep hearing about how liberals are 'reality-based', but they sure seem to be stuck in a circa-1963 Classic Comix narrative of race-relations in America, impervious to the reality of the streets in framing and vocabulary.
To interested consumers, you won't find the answer to the question 'Why is Trayvon Martin's life is fantastically more important to the chattering classes than the life of some all-night convenience-store clerk' in CJR or Mother Jones. Check out Tom Wolfe's 'The Bonfire of the Vanities' - from way back in 1987 - for the bigger picture.
#2 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Tue 3 Apr 2012 at 12:42 PM
Dude, didn't we just go over this?
Did you not read the Lowry link?
#3 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Tue 3 Apr 2012 at 01:21 PM
As usual, Thimbles, your link misses the point - which is the huge amount of press attention this particular case has received, and the way the establishment press has worked to fit it into a narrative of 'young black males are in danger from white males on the street'. Do you really think you would know who Trayvon Martin was if the shooter had been black and as yet uncharged by the police? Be honest, now. Or if the victim had been white and the shooter black? Stuff happens every day without Soledad O'Brien getting her underwear in a bunch, without intense coverage by the networks, without front-page 'analysis' pieces in the NY Times, without large statements from third-rate academics about 'white racism' on NPR programs.
The question press critics repeatedly ask, and the MSM squirms to avoid answering, is what drives the selection of what is 'news', and how is it framed into a narrative? (It gets asked by the more marginal Left, too, but seldom on the topic of the social issues.) We saw an answer recently with the emotional coverage of the Komen Foundation's decision to withdraw a small subsidy from Planned Parenthood, when Andrea Mitchell and her sorority decided arbitrarily to make it a big issue. (In an irony probably lost on such irony-impaired types as Beltway lifers, donations to the Komen Foundation are down - thus curtailing the capacity of the Foundation to fund those breast exams that Mitchell pretended to be concerned about if PP's subsidy, which was about enough to cover Cecile Richards' salary, was withdrawn. Thanks, Andrea.) On the social issues, the people who decide what is 'news' decide on the basis of their own priorities, and those priorities are, among that demographic (urban, affluent) overwhelmingly selected and framed to conform to an urban-affluent narrative. It's them, it's their friends and co-workers, it's the air they breath. It's not even intentional, it's reflexive.
#4 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Wed 4 Apr 2012 at 07:45 PM
"and the way the establishment press has worked to fit it into a narrative of 'young black males are in danger from white males on the street'. "
I don't care what the stupid press narrative is. The real story is about how a man shot and killed a kid and, for some reason, the legal authorities saw fit to work against the interests of justice. There's something sick in Sanford.
"Do you really think you would know who Trayvon Martin was if the shooter had been black and as yet uncharged by the police?"
Potentially? Yeah. In fact if, I recall correctly, Zimmerman isn't exactly pink.
"Or if the victim had been white and the shooter black?"
Are you kidding. Do you really doubt this wouldn't become a story in "Obama's America", as Limbaugh phrased it?
Come on.
Now if you want to talk about the right's attacks on Planned Parenthood and how people of an insidious nature thought it would be fun to take over charities and use their clout to marginalize it, that's not really an issue I need to take on for myself.
I will say, by attacking PP and contraception in such obvious and nasty ways, the republicans have ensured that PP will have plenty of funding from the half of the population who is becoming more aware that their hard won status in western society is under attack.
#5 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Wed 4 Apr 2012 at 10:03 PM
Thimbles, please give me an example of a case in which the shooter was black and the victim was white, in which there was such a media uproar.
I'd also like to see some stats on rates of violence in Sanford vs. those of other cities. I believe the term for this 'outrage' is 'cherry-picking'. Where do you live, exactly, and is your community 'sicker' than Sanford by your own standards.
Rush Limbaugh is one side of the story; The NY Times, The Washington Post, NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, the wire services, NPR, and the glossy New York magazines are another. Wanna trade? I'd take that trade when it comes to communications penetration.
When it comes to narrative of race and violence in America, the above-named new organizations are still in 'Who are you going to believe, us or your own eyes?' territory. You can't even concede the reality that everyone knows concerning the demographics of violent crime in this country. This is a major reason white liberalism has lost political influence since the 1960s. Politically-incorrect victims are nobodies to them. The party of compassion turns cold and deaf when there is no simple-minded liberal civics lesson that fits into a 'To Kill a Mockingbird' scenario.
#6 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Thu 5 Apr 2012 at 09:00 AM
"Thimbles, please give me an example of a case in which the shooter was black and the victim was white, in which there was such a media uproar."
I don't think there's been a case where a black person shot a white person while the black person was recorded on the phone with 911 being told to stand down, and then the police let the black person go because it was too ambiguous an act to be considered a crime under the guns laws, and then the police label the body a "John Doe" and slap him in the morge for three days despite having identifying materials such as his wallet and cellphone.
When that happens, I'll be sure to come back to you with measurements of the uproar.
"I'd also like to see some stats on rates of violence in Sanford vs. those of other cities. "
I've been calling for that since the beginning. Mother jones seems to be answering that call.
http://m.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/04/george-zimmerman-unlikely-ever-be-convicted-killing-trayvon-martin
http://m.motherjones.com/politics/2012/03/trayvon-martin-sanford-racial-history
#7 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Thu 5 Apr 2012 at 11:46 AM
Very convincing - if actual statistics on crime don't matter. For those of you who won't bother to go to the links, the Mother Jones story rambles with anecdotes, but does not actually produce statistics comparing rates of violence, rates of interracial violence, or anything else relevant to the large assertions about Sanford, about Florida, and about the United States being made by our friends the chattering classes.
This let's-pretend narrative about crime is a loser. Even liberal friends - usually women, a social worker, a professor in the social sciences - privately acknowledge their fear of physical violence from men generally, but from the Trayvon Martin demographic specifically. Even Jesse Jackson made some uncharacteristically lucid comments along the same lines some years back. This is not a justification for the killing of Trayvon Martin; after all, women fear men on the street after dark, and I'm a man, and I don't want to be shot for that reason in a sketchy situation. If the evidence is there that Zimmerman stalked and shot an innocent kid for whatever reason, then Florida has the death penalty for such cases. It's the tendency of the bloviators to start generalizing from this case that I find unreal. It is disgustingly demagoguic, but, see, it's OK if liberals do it.
(Which brings us to a side issue that reality-impaired media liberals have forgotten to consider: some of the inspiration for these laws came out of the cases of battered women charged with shooting their abusive partners. Something that wouldn't occur to the Soledad O'Brien mentality.)
You dodgy response about the media-driven hysteria when the shooter is white and the victim is black vs. the dead silence in the cases where the roles are reversed is creative, which I expect, but also sadly instructive of the denial that exists when it comes to race - maybe a continuation, rather than a reversal, of older ways of thinking?
#8 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Thu 5 Apr 2012 at 12:51 PM
The thing about Sanford is that it's not just one community. There's Sanford and then there's gated Sanford and gated Sanford is a much different place.
If you want to keep talking about this incident as if the controversy is over the act or the ethnicity of the actors, I don't know what to say.
The people who are really looking at this story see that the controversy is in the response of the authorities according to the assumptions of the neighborhood. If we cannot trust the judgement of our security agents, and we obviously can't since they found justification to let this hot head go, then we need to get to the root of that problem and solve it.
If you're not interested in solving that problem, then what is your interest? Pointing at liberals and mouthing "Ha Ha! Black kids die all the time, stupid libs! Trayvon's just another body on the statistical pile! Ha Ha!" ?
Sorry Nelson, but that's not an interesting conversation to me.
#9 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Thu 5 Apr 2012 at 01:35 PM
Thimbles, CJR advertises itself as a journalism review. CJR and others are simply unable to answer the key question of 'Why is this murder so much more important to journalists than thousands of others?' without giving away the frozen 1960s political narrative behind the all-out coverage. In this case, the 'narrative' rationale for the heavy coverage is unusually far from reality. That's all.
#10 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Thu 5 Apr 2012 at 04:58 PM
A killer angle Taibbi covers in the way some crimes are policed and others aren't:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/mike-bloombergs-new-york-cops-in-your-hallways-20120403
"We have two definitely connected phenomena, often treated as separate and unconnected: a growing lawlessness in the financial sector, and an expanding, repressive, increasingly lunatic police apparatus trained at the poor, and especially the nonwhite poor.
In recent years, as Wall Street firms turned into veritable felony factories, we had pundits and politicians who cranked out reams of excuses for one white-collar criminal after another and argued, in complete seriousness, that sending a rich banker to jail "wouldn't solve anything" and in fact we should "tolerate the excesses" of the productive rich, who "channel opportunity" to the rest of us.
On the other hand, we've had politicians and pundits in budget fights and other controversies railing against the parasitic poor, who are not only not "productive" enough to warrant a break, but assumed to be actively unproductive (they consume our tax money and public services) and therefore sort of guilty in advance.
When I read this "Clean Halls" story I immediately thought of the various robosigning scandals. If even one law enforcement official had been able to take just one stroll through, say, the credit card collections office of a Chase or a Bank of America at any time in the last decade, he would have seen rows of cubicles full of entry-level employees whose entire job was to sit around all day long, right out in the open, forging court documents. Whole departments attended to this job for years and years and somehow nobody with a badge ever got a whiff of it.
But in New York, we have cops cruising through private buildings, checking bags full of ketchup 200,000 times a year. Makes sense, doesn't it?"
Security state for the 99%, free for all for the 1%.
The defining charecteristic of crime in our time is the percieved victimer's position on social strata relative to the victim. If the victimizer is a serial forger in a bank or a trigger happy neighborhood watcher in a gated community, we don't see crime.
If the victimizer is a bunch of hippies in Zuccoti park who dare shout at bailed out wall street bankers, the riot police will intervene.
Two worlds, no justice.
#11 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Sat 7 Apr 2012 at 02:48 PM
No - Justice.
This is not a sustainable model for a society.
#12 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Sat 7 Apr 2012 at 11:26 PM