Just when you think the Trayvon Martin story has apex’d away from insufferable you read something blood boiling LIKE THIS MIT media research study, replete with Ryan Julison interview smarm, and the blood pressure cuff needs another replacement.
Martin’s family was able to enlist the legal services of civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump on a pro bono basis. Crump had taken on a previous civil rights case and failed to convict, which he attributed to an inadequate media strategy prior to the trial itself (Caputo, 2012). Crump brought on local lawyer Natalie Jackson, who enlisted the pro bono services of publicist Ryan Julison.
Julison’s pitch did not emphasize the racial element to the story, but underscored agreed upon facts: a neighborhood watch vigilante, who was carrying a gun, shot an unarmed teenager, and was not arrested. Julison was particularly struck by the fact that a neighborhood watch captain would be carrying a firearm with no training of any kind other than a concealed weapons permit (Julison, 2012). Our manual analysis of stories confirmed that this detail had not appeared in most of the local coverage following Martin’s death. Later, Crump, when interviewed about the case, introduced racial framing around the story as the national media began to pay attention (Boedeker and Comas, 2012). (link)
Oh, how the meme advances embeds. The study…
…. is a little academically wonky but well worth the read if only to see how the false assumptions are yet still embedded inside the uninformed framework.
The MIT study itself is also presented in another article, “How a crime becomes political: Trayvon Martin and the way different media co-create the news“, which does a slightly better job of digging through the weeds to expose the nature of the political ruse.
The second article actually might lower blood pressure -from the first- for it contains an insightful comment upon conclusion:
This exemplary study is, perhaps, one of the most important stories to come out of this incident, and maps in detail how a minor event was deliberately manipulated into a national and international news story with ramifications far beyond the actual elements of the incident – such as racial profiling, Stand Your Ground laws, and racial discrimination in, or ineffectiveness of, the legal system.
What it proves, beyond any reasonable doubt, is that it was the intervention of the Martin family legal and PR team which caused enough noise to disseminate a contrived narrative, containing substantial misinformation, into the public domain.
And, just as importantly, it was not until after the Black and Left alternative media ran with the false narrative that the conservative blog sites entered the fray to challenge and counteract what had then become a national mainstream disinformation campaign.
Then, some of the Left media, instead of investigating the veracity of the counter-claims, instead attacked the sources of those claims or attacked the claims as “misinformation” or “character assassination” while ignoring their own complicity in spreading misinformation willfully created by the Martin Family Team. – Robert Riversong
Yes. THIS! ↑
Meanwhile slightly off topic: 1.) we will continue monitoring the Ben Kruidbos lawsuit and assisting with information where possible. 2.) we are not finished with the M-DSPD angle, just staying small…..
