The Media and Racial Controversies

Trayvon Martin was a 17 year old black boy from Florida. The story about Trayvon Martin’s death has been all over the news for the past few weeks. The controversy over his death and no one knowing exactly what happened that night between the boy and the neighborhood watch, George Zimmerman, has been splitting people and their opinions on the situation. The story from the news is that Trayvon Martin was just walking to his father’s fiancée’s house from the convenience store talking on the phone with his girlfriend. A man who is a part of the neighborhood watch in that neighborhood sees Trayvon and supposedly thinks Trayvon looks like a threat to the neighborhood. Zimmerman called 911 and while talking to the dispatcher tells them that they have had a lot of break-ins in the neighborhood lately and that he sees someone who looks suspicious and like he is on drugs or something. The dispatcher asks Zimmerman if he looks white, black, or Hispanic and Zimmerman says black. He describes to the dispatcher what Trayvon was wearing and said it was a dark hoodie, jeans or sweat pants, and white tennis shoes. The dispatcher while sending the police out to check up on the area asks the Zimmerman if he is following Trayvon and he says yes so the dispatcher told him that they didn’t need him to do that and he said okay and they ended the call. After Zimmerman’s phone call with 911 there was a phone call to 911 from a woman around the area who could not see Zimmerman and Trayvon but could hear some yelling going on and during this phone call there is a gunshot sound from when Zimmerman shot Trayvon. The news reporters said that when the police arrived on the site Trayvon was laying in the grass face down and Zimmerman had a bloody nose and a wound in the back of his head. Just 30 minutes after the first police car arrived at the scene, a police officer arrived at the police station with Zimmerman in the car. The station is 15 minutes from the scene which only leaves about 15 minutes for the police at the scene to ask questions and investigate and help Zimmerman with his injuries. This is unrealistic timing if he was injured bad enough. The police were told by Zimmerman that he was being attacked by Trayvon which is why he shot him and what he thought was a gun in Trayvon’s hand was only a bag of skittles.

                This is a sad story that has been blown up by the media. There have been so many misunderstandings about this story because the media has been telling so many different things to the people watching the news without having the full story. The media can easily sway people’s opinions by feeding them what they want to hear. This story has gotten many people interested and wanting to know more which is what the media does. They will tell people anything to get them to watch. These kinds of things happen every day around the world but they don’t all get put out into the public and all over the news like this story has. The more people show interest, the more the media will do to keep their interest. They will tell people anything they want to and with this being more of a racial story people get more interested in those kinds of stories. If it was two white men that this was about it probably wouldn’t have been so blown up. Because of the fact that Zimmerman was watching Trayvon and said he was black and wearing a hoodie and jeans and walking around, Zimmerman found him suspicious. I, along with many others, am confused as to why being a black male and wearing a hoodie means that someone is up to no good. People believe that if Trayvon would have been a white boy that Zimmerman wouldn’t have been so paranoid and this would have never happened. I have heard so many mixed opinions about the Trayvon Martin story and no one will ever know the exact truth about what happened that night and the story will probably be all over the TV until people begin to lose interest and then people will begin to forget about it and move onto the next big story.  All of this just shows how much of an impact the media has on people today and the media’s representations of people of color. Any story about racial conflict can almost be guaranteed to be seen in the media because it is a topic that gets people interested. This reminds me of a few racial stories that we have read in our class. One story that we read that was kind of about race that got people interested was the story from last week called “Too Poor to Parent”. In that story it talked about women in poverty and the two women it focused on were women of color and how they were poor and got their children taken away because the government wouldn’t help. This story was more racial because people are stereotyped and like the Trayvon Martin story, they were racially profiled. Many people get more interested in racial controversies which causes the media to feed on the stories about race. 

•  http://www.cnn.com/search/?query=trayvon+martin&x=0&y=0&primaryType=mixed&sortBy=date&intl=false
•  http://www.racialicious.com/2012/03/20/voices-justice-for-trayvon-martin/
• Burroughs, Gaylynn. Too Poor to Parent. Woman's Voices Feminists Visions Pg.  571-573.