ABC “News” Gets on Trayvon Martin Bandwagon, Acting as Martin’s Family Mouthpiece; Attorney for Martin’s Family, Benjamin Crump, Refuses to Release All Information about Teen’s Last Phone Call to Girlfriend, but Insists That It Requires That Shooter George Zimmerman be Arrested “Right Now”
Seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin is dead, and that is a human tragedy. But the mainstream media have no sense of the tragic. They are birds of prey, yet unlike vultures, for them both the dead Trayvon, and the living George Zimmerman, are food. And they are feasting.
Seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin is dead, and that is a human tragedy. But the mainstream media have no sense of the tragic. They are birds of prey, yet unlike vultures, for them both the dead Trayvon, and the living George Zimmerman, are food. And they are feasting.
ABC News “reporter” Matt Gutman tells us, “Trayvon Martin’s girlfriend is speaking out,” and “ABC News was there exclusively as the 16-year-old girl told Crump about the last moments of the teenager’s life,” but does not show her speaking on camera, or even play her voice speaking off-camera.
This is pure agitprop. The girl would have told the lawyer about the phone call three weeks ago. She wasn’t “telling” Crump about the phone call, anymore than a friendly witness would be “telling” a lawyer interrogating her in a trial anything new. In both cases, the witness would be performing a script. Crump had gone over with the girl exactly what she was to say, and ABC “News,” which routinely cooperates in the production of such performances, knows that better than anyone.
But since the girl didn’t even perform for the public, she isn’t “speaking out” at all— Benjamin Crump and Matt Gutman are. However, Crump and Matt Gutman are using the girl to try and give their own agitprop more legitimacy.
But since even with ABC News’ ability to dramatically edit the girl’s show, its producers still chose to withhold it, I guess her performance wasn’t that good.
And contrary to ABC News’ dishonest headline, the girlfriend’s secret performance didn’t “Trigger[s] Demand for Arrest ‘Right Now.’” How could it? The demand preceded the “story” by almost a week.
As for the lawyer’s claims that the phone call “‘blows ... out of the water’ the shooter's self-defense claim,” it does nothing of the sort. We already knew that Zimmerman was following Martin. What alleged reporter Matt Gutman deliberately left out was that according to Florida’s Stand Your Ground Law, Zimmerman had every right to follow Martin. Crump and his media allies are deliberately misrepresenting the law, because they hate it, and they know that otherwise their argument fails.
The lawyer said he would give the details of the phone call to the federal investigation.
“We're going to turn this over to the Justice Department because the family does not trust the Sanford Police Department to have anything to do with the investigation,” said Crump.
Note that this is the same Benjamin Crump who demanded that Sanford police release the recording of George Zimmerman’s recording, prior to completing their investigation. But now he is withholding most of the alleged information call he now claims is his basis for demanding that Zimmerman be immediately arrested. Talk about dirty pool!
Crump is bluffing. If what he has said about the call is the best he’s got, then he’s got nothing, and is trying to make it sound as if the phone call were significant. If the phone call were so important, and he were honest, he would release everything he has about it. And that ABC News has chosen to let him determine what he has, while themselves parroting his line, by bragging about having “exclusively” been present for the non-revelations, while refusing to report on what went on, underscores that it is not acting in a journalistic function at all, but rather merely trying to help Crump railroad George Zimmerman. Racist WFTV “reporter” Daralene Jones followed a similar script, when she got the ball rolling on March 14.
ABC’s Matt Gutman also neglected to report that much maligned Sanford Police Chief Bill Lee Jr. had invited the feds to investigate the case days before the racist protests and petitions demanded as much.
What Crump is claiming, and Gutman is insinuating, is that Trayvon Martin was on his cellphone when Zimmerman killed him. In order to promote this story, they have to leave out that little business about Martin beating Zimmerman bloody.
I’ll have much more to say on this case, and I thank the readers who have been sending me articles about it.
[P.S. Benjamin Crump has since claimed that Trayvon Martin’s father only learned about the girlfriend’s call three weeks after the shooting, when he was going through the boy’s cell phone records. Crump expects us to believe that neither the girlfriend nor her family ever reached out directly to Trayvon's family, or through an intermediary, to tell them that she had been speaking to him at the bitter end. Well, color me skeptical.]
Award-winning, New York-based freelancer Nicholas Stix founded A Different Drummer magazine (1989-93). Stix has written for Die Suedwest Presse, New York Daily News, New York Post, Newsday, Middle American News, Toogood Reports, Insight, Chronicles, the American Enterprise, Campus Reports, VDARE, the Weekly Standard, Front Page Magazine, Ideas on Liberty, National Review Online and the Illinois Leader. His column also appears at Men's News Daily, MichNews, Intellectual Conservative, Enter Stage Right and OpinioNet. Stix has studied at colleges and universities on two continents, and earned a couple of sheepskins, but he asks that the reader not hold that against him. His day jobs have included washing pots, building Daimler-Benzes on the assembly-line, tackling shoplifters and teaching college, but his favorite job was changing his son's diapers.
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