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)