Of course your view is completely unbiased :rolleyes:. How many blown facts before you will admit that something else is going on here? I see that you simply refuse to see the other side unless the new orgs come out and admit that their bias is what led to all the errors in this story.
Sigh…not reporting on the race is not hiding something. People can look at the victim and perp without the media coloring the story and producing the narritive. Not reporting the race hides nothing. Reporting the races involved, along with selective editing, etc. helps to create the narrative.
Depends on how you mean “fit better.” I think they felt the reference to Martin’s race was relevant but didn’t appreciate the fact that having Zimmerman bring it up rather than the 911 dispatcher changes the context. They were wrong.
None, because I don’t believe the news media is run by a shadowy conspiracy of people pushing the agenda of whatever-yorick73-thinks-the-agenda-is. I realize that when you come into the discussion with the preconceived notion that the media is liberal and always pushes particular stories, it’s easy to turn any mistake into evidence of the conspiracy. In the real world, you can’t make a convicing argument by working backward that way.
You’re going to have to explain your rules here. Are you saying it’s OK for the press to publish pictures, but not mention the races of the people involved? Is it somehow supposed to matter that people see what Martin and Zimmerman look like, but if the words “black” and “Hispanic” are published, it introduces bias?
And yet here we are. It was stupid and should have been obvious, but it’s also more plausible than the yorick73 theory, which holds that nobody would care about the fact that a guy shot an unarmed teenager and wasn’t arrested, but that nobody would care about that story unless they also believed the shooter was a white guy who hunts black people for sport.
They would care no matter what, but they would care more if it was another Emmit Till story. (Hard to imagine that you disagree with this, but I’ve not been following your exchange with Yorick with the attention it deserves, so I’m not certain what precise point is being debated).
More to my point though, is Brazil84’s post above (#110). I don’t think the NBC people deliberately tried to present what they knew to be a false picture by changing the context of the quote. Rather, they thought anyway that the truth was that GZ was guided by racist impulses, and this edit was just a way of bringing that “truth” into sharper focus. So while they would understand in general that changing who raised the racial issue was a significant change to the extent that one was looking for evidence that race was a motivating factor, it was not all that significant from the persective of someone who already “knew” that race was a motivating factor.
And that’s where the bias comes into play. Because the NBC people were predisposed to see the racial angle, and this impacted how they presented it. In this case they crossed a line and tripped up, and this is a dramatic illustration of the issue. But this same mindset could drive their presentation in other less egregious ways, but ways which nonetheless reflect the same mindset and predisposition.
What makes you think that George Zimmerman is “a mestizo” or for that matter that his Peruvian mother was?
Do you know what that word means? You do realize that only about 37% of all Peruvians identify themselves as “mestizo” while 15% call themselves “blancos”(AKA “whites”) and that this especially true of upper-crust Peruvians who are almost all of %100 European descent.
Do you think this Peruvian woman should be classified as “non-white”
I haven’t seen any data, but I suspect that most Peruvian immigrants to the US, like most Colombian immigrants are from the upper classes rather than being the children of Campesinos.
As to your claim that Zimmerman is only called “a white Hispanic” because it fits “the leftist narrative” it’s worth noting that 37% of all Latinos classify themselves as white and in Florida with it’s high Cuban and Colombian population, the figure is almost certainly higher.
Do you consider Charlie Sheen, Cameron Diaz, Jorge Garcia(Hurley from Lost) and Andy Garcia “non-whites”?
Funny that my notion is preconceived while the media just made a few “mistakes”. ABC was quick to report that Zimmerman did not have any visible injuries on that grainy police video and then had to walk that back once the video was enhanced. How long did the media report that Zimmerman weighed a hulking 250 lbs.?
I note that you did not make reference to the widely reported rapine and savagery that occurred in the New Orleans Louisiana Superdome during Kartrina that turned out to be nothing but invented nonsense or the seriously underreported attacks by suburban New Orleans police forces on people fleeing New Orleans. I see no references to the initial reports that “Middle Eastern looking” men were suspected of having blown up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.
One can make any case one wishes by cherry-picking the news reports that one chooses to quote.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but racism of the type you describe (and any other type) is very widely reported (and frequently greatly exagerated, as you’ve done here) and an enormous focus in this country.
By contrast, the issue I raised is not nearly as much of a focus.
Just curious on your view. How often do you think these kinds of things happen to each of whatever racial groups you want to identify? Do you think it is more likely that a white person be charged and convicted for being white, or that a person of color be charged and convicted for being of color? Care to estimate the frequency of these biases?
Am I a bad person for knowing (and chucking at after the fact) that rapine is the violent seizure of someone’s property and thinking that is what you meant?
I couldn’t tell frequencies, but I think it’s very likely that an innocent “person of color” would be more likely to be charged and convicted of a violent crime based on stereotypes about them than a white person would be.
But it’s not as if one thing cancels out the other. Each is independent, and each case deserves to be treated on its own. And when considering a specific case concerning a specific person, whether “of color” or not, it’s worth considering what stereotypes might be in play.
In the cases discussed in the thread title and OP, I think the Evil White Man preying on the Downtrodden Minority were the sterotypes in play. As in the case that just came up in which a judge confessed to having sentenced an innocent man to 15 years in jail based on his predisposition to see that particular stereotype.
If you think that I have exaggerated anything, point it out. Despite Shodan’s transparent attempt to pretend that there was nothing “racist” about the reports on the Superdome, those false reports were widely disseminated. Police in the New Orleans suburbs did attack people fleeing from New Orleans (even entering New Orleans to do so). The Murrah bombing was originally attributed to Middle eastern terrorists. Beyond that, we went over twenty years inflicting disparate punishment on cocaine users depending on whether their drug of choice was more popular among whites or blacks.
Reports of actual racism are frequently published once and done with no follow-up.
If you wish to make a claim that racism is not nearly as bad in the U.S. in 2014 as it was in 1964 or 1974 and even in more recently, I would actually agree with you. Beyond that your selective attention to some events while ignoring others is little more than recreational outrage. Certainly, some racism is exaggerated while other examples are ignored. I would guess that this has rather more to do with the news being processed on a daily basis, reacting with the old “if it bleeds, it leads” motivation than anything else, and this variety will stop when racism is truly something that society, as a whole, has left behind.
Rather than not being a “focus,” it is simply rare.
Write to Fox News. I am sure that they can address the issue with their usual high standards–or, at least, more to your liking.
Actually, that was what I meant. There were reports of rape, but there were more reports of people simply taking their fellow victims’ property along with beatings and other violence.
You’ve exaggerated things, but my point was that it’s irrelevant because even if what you’re claiming would be true, it would not affect my point. So I’m not interested in hijacking this point in favor of a discussion of your distortions.
The shoe is on the other foot here.
I’m a guy who is simply pointing to one specific issue. That’s not “selective attention to some events while ignoring others” - that just means that there’s already a lot of discussion of those issues and I’m interested in discussing this one as well.
By contrast, you are a guy who is trying to shut down discussion of an issue, by insisting on canceling it out by raising other issues when it’s being discussed. That would be an example of a guy who not only pays “selective attention to some events while ignoring others”, but is trying to force everyone else to do the same.
Hard to know how rare it is. But it happens, and has happened in some pretty high profile cases that have been deemed worthy of discussion. I’m adding my piece.
Thank you for your wise advice. However, I’ve decided to reject it, and to post here instead. Now what?
