http://frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/framing-trayvon/
“Nonetheless, what happened should be seen as a tragedy involving two well-meaning individuals who acted without fully appreciating the possible consequences of their actions. It should not be seen as an acting out of the nation’s melodrama on race. That is reserved for the crowds of spectators who have clamored for a verdict before the trial and distorted the facts but who, in a more healthy time, would have left the wheels of justice to turn on their own.”
From the moment the Trayvon Martin shooting rose to the national spotlight, the story became entangled in the nation’s diseased dialogue on race. Racial arsonists like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson descended on the scene at the head of the left-wing lynch mob to force a verdict of guilty on Zimmerman because he was allegedly white. Without the benefit of evidence, George Zimmerman became a caricature of everything lynchers like Sharpton and Jackson claim America to be — hateful, bigoted and indifferent to the loss of African-American life.
Thus, provoked by years of race-baiting from the left, many conservatives have responded in kind, indulging in a parallel demonization campaign of Trayvon Martin designed as a protest against past injustices by civil rights racists against whites (think no further than the destruction of Paula Deen and the acquittal of O.J. Simpson). In an effort to right decades of racial wrongs, many conservatives have hastily embraced caricatures of Trayvon Martin, painting him as a vicious street thug who deserved his fate. Quite apart from the merits of the legal case, this unseemly effort shows the power of the racist left over the mind of the nation. A look at how this works will hopefully serve as a corrective.
One prominent example of anti-Martin slander is a chain email currently being circulated on the Internet. The photo that corresponds to the text is visible above:
Do you know who this is?
It is Little Trayvon Martin…! At 17 yrs of age.
For those of us who thought we were well informed and weren’t…..quite the reality check. That old adage applies here: “there are two sides to every story.”
We don’t always get the truth from the media. One of my favorite rants – the liberal controlled media, television news, newspapers, magazines, radio; all continue to show 12 year old Trayvon; NOT 17 year old Trayvon.
In fact, there are plenty of 17-year-old pictures of Trayvon available but this one (above) is not one of them. It is a photo of Jayceon Terrell Taylor, also known as “The Game,” a 32-year-old rapper from Compton, CA. Yes, Trayvon had tattoos but they didn’t look anything like this. There were two of them. One was a tattoo on his chest of two praying hands with pearls and the names of his grandmother and great-grandmother. The other was a tattoo on his wrist of his mother’s name.