If you’re feeling as though you’ve been transported back in time to ten years ago after reading that headline, no worries. I assure you we’re in the present day. But unfortunately, the mainstream media is still up to their same old tricks on matters of race, deceptively framing stories in ways that they think bolster their false narrative.
You may recall that a decade ago, an intense nationwide debate revolving around race, profiling, self-defense, and stand your ground laws was beginning in the aftermath of the February 26, 2012 shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, who was black, at the hands of George Zimmerman, a 28-year-old Hispanic man.
Zimmerman was a neighborhood watch volunteer in the Sanford, Florida community he lived in and had initially called 911 from his SUV to report Martin as “a suspicious person” shortly before the fatal shooting took place.
Zimmerman was questioned by the Sanford PD but initially wasn’t charged because they said didn’t have any evidence contradicting his claim of self-defense. It was that decision along with increased coverage from local and national media outlets alike, as well as then-President Barack Obama’s insertion of himself into the case that sparked outrage and the national conversation that ensued.
A full month into the case, NBC’s “TODAY Show” aired a segment that included a deceptively edited clip of Zimmerman’s 911 call. It was edited in a way that made it sound like Zimmerman was the one who brought up Martin’s race. Here’s the actual transcript of that portion of the call:
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.911 Operator: Okay, is this guy, is he white, black, or Hispanic?Zimmerman: He looks black.
In the “TODAY Show” version, the 911 operator’s question about Martin’s race was completely edited out. A “news” report on the MSNBC website did the same thing, but was quietly changed after conservative websites like Newsbusters raised the issue.
After an internal investigation was launched into the matter, NBC News fired the producer behind the segment a couple of weeks later and not long after that a reporter for their Miami affiliate who also edited the call in the same way.
After he was found “not guilty” in his trial, Zimmerman went on to sue NBC News for libel, but the case was dismissed by the same judge who presided over his murder trial.
Here we are ten years later, and the New York Times has done the exact same thing NBC News did in their infamous segment.
Liberal columnist Charles Blow sat down with Obama, Rev. Al Sharpton, and civil rights activist Henry Louis Gates Jr. to discuss the anniversary of Martin’s death and how it was, in their view, the catalyst for the rebirth of the modern-day civil rights movement. Blow wrote an opinion piece on the interviews, and included with the piece was a nearly 7-minute video clip.
At the :43 mark of the video, you begin to hear parts of Zimmerman’s 911 call. A the :55 spot, you hear the exact same edit that NBC News did in their piece. It’s made to sound as though Zimmerman initiated the racial component into the call:
As it was the last time around, it was conservative websites that caught it, including Hot Air and Newsbusters.
The Times Opinion section was so proud of the story that they pinned it to the top of their Twitter page for a time:
As of this writing, the Times’ video is still up on the website, on Twitter, and on YouTube.
Though the Times hasn’t publicly commented on the criticism that they deliberately edited or used the well-known deliberately edited clip clip to bolster their unfounded opinion that Zimmerman was racially profiling Martin, NBC News has maintained that the edit to that TODAY Show report was a mistake. But Bearing Arms did a video shortly after NBC News fired their producer that showed how there’s no way the edit could have merely been a “mistake”:
The New York Times’ edit or use of it wasn’t a mistake, either. It was deliberate, just as it was deliberate when the Times referred to Zimmerman as a “white Hispanic” in some of their reports.
As was the case when this happened in 2012, heads should roll at the “newspaper of record,” but they won’t, because despite their routine claims of wanting to see this nation unify and heal from its racial wounds, news outlets like the New York Times feed off of racial strife and work hard to fan the flames of racism, because it gives their increasingly “woke” newsrooms the opportunity to virtue signal about how supposedly committed they are to racial justice.
And yet they still wonder why so few people trust them. Go figure.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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