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Saturday, August 24, 2013

Controlling the Narrative: Trayvon Martin & Delbert Belton

All groups have a story, or narrative they tell themselves which justifies what they believe about the world. The narrative can be mostly true or mostly false, but it always serves to justify the actions of the group. The narrative is controlled by emphasizing evidence that reinforces it and ignoring evidence that does not.

The media in the US is mostly liberal and it has a narrative about racism which is not hard to spot. The biggest news story in the US in the past year was the trial of George Zimmerman. Zimmerman was acquitted of murder for shooting and killing Trayvon Martin during a fight. Almost every news story about the incident emphasized that Zimmerman was a white Hispanic and Martin was an unarmed black teen.

There was also much discussion of Zimmerman's alleged racism including possible hate crime charges. The race of Zimmerman and Martin was mentioned in nearly every story. If you do a search for "Trayon unarmed black" on the New York Times website, the phrase occurs almost 200 times in the past year.

Compare that to the coverage of the murder of Delbert Belton, a WW2 vet who was robbed and beaten to death last Wednesday. Almost every story omitted the race of the suspects, though a few showed pictures.

Isn't it strange the one story mentioned the race of those involved without fail and the other does not? When you think about the narrative most of the media is pushing, it's not strange at all.

Liberal journalists want the people to agree with them so the government will be controlled by them.
The reason they focus so much attention on white-on-black racism is because liberals are the self-styled saviors of black people. A large portion of their power is based on the principle that blacks need to be helped because of racism- an idea which is ironically racist itself. Programs and policies like public housing, Head Start, Affirmative Action, etc. are often justified on the basis of counteracting the effects of racism. In order to hold on to the political power these programs give to liberals, they must constantly harp on the problem of racism and downplay the substantial evidence that the real problem is their misguided efforts to help people. Economist Walter Williams does a great job of explaining this in his film Good Intentions:



I don't have a problem with advocacy, but I prefer it when people are up front about it. If you want to call yourself a journalist, you must be impartial and report all the facts for every story. If, on the other hand, your goal is to make converts, you should say so and state your affiliation. I think it would be great if a D or R or I appeared after every journalist's name just like politicians.

And finally, since today is the anniversary of MLK's I Have a Dream speech, I feel this video is appropriate:


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