"The race-baiting media owe George Zimmerman an apology. A jury of his peers has spoken. Zimmerman was acquitted, and that’s that. Any continuation of the media’s unrelenting, divisive, hate-mongering coverage is an absolute disgrace," NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell argued in a statement released this afternoon.
"Race baiting persists in America because it’s encouraged by the press," the Media Research Center founder and president noted, citing how NBC News employees like Al Sharpton, Joe Scarborough, and Savannah Guthrie have "stirr[ed] hatred because it fits their biased worldview and boosts ratings." Consider the following examples of race baiting in the months prior to the trial:
- For a full week in March 2012, NBC News ran audio tape of George Zimmerman’s 911 call before the shooting – that tape is now the subject of a defamation lawsuit against NBC for its allegedly deceptive editing to make Zimmerman sound racist.
- ”The AP, CBS, MSNBC and other outlets erroneously reported that Zimmerman was white, and eventually The New York Times and Reuters decided he was “white Hispanic.”
- NBC employee and MSNBC host Al Sharpton agitated on- and off-air, demanding Zimmerman’s arrest.
- On March 21, 2012, Sharpton’s colleague Joe Scarborough called Zimmerman a “murderer,” and “the man who murdered Trayvon Martin.”
- Slate.com suggested that Zimmerman killed Martin due to something called the “racial empathy gap.”
Of course, this didn't stop on Saturday evening with a jury of his peers acquitting Zimmerman.
[image of post-Zimmerman trial vandalism via KTVU.com]
With the verdict in and Zimmerman acquitted, the media continue their race-baiting narrative:
- Immediately after the verdict was read, an AP reporter tweeted "So we can all kill teenagers now? Just checking."
- On July 14, writing for POLITICO, Scarborough doubled down, saying that it is "my belief that George Zimmerman is a racist idiot who chased an unarmed teenager through a neighborhood for little reason more than he was a black man wearing a hoodie."
- Also on July 14, CNN’s Candy Crowley asked Illinois Governor Pat Quinn, “Do you think the American justice system is innately racist?”
- On July 15, on NBC’s “Today,” anchor Savannah Guthrie wondered whether there hadn’t been enough race in the trial, asking Sharpton, “Do you think the prosecutors missed an opportunity there, that they didn't explicitly make this case about racial profiling?”
"Sharpton and his ilk in the media will have to answer for any violence perpetrated against George Zimmerman or anyone else in the name of Trayvon Martin," MRC president Bozell noted, concluding his statement by noting that "Martin’s death was an absolute tragedy, but that doesn’t give the liberal media carte blanche to encourage racial violence and mayhem for ratings."
