The New York Times is no stranger to fiction. Back in the 1930s, the paper’s Moscow correspondent, Walter Duranty, outright lied about Stalin’s intentional starving of millions of Ukrainians (and won a Pulitzer prize for doing it). But more recently it has peddled a deception that, though involving an event far less tragic than genocide, is no less brazen.
The issue concerns a February 26 Trayvon Martin video tribute the Times released, and ex-president Barack Obama heavily contributed to and publicized, that turns truth on its head as much as Duranty ever could.
Jack Cashill wrote about this Saturday at American Thinker. Cashill, who boasts a Ph.D. in American studies, is no stranger to the Martin event. He not only attended the trial of George Zimmerman — who shot Martin in 2012 in self-defense — but also wrote many articles on the subject, penned a book entitled If I Had a Son: Race, Guns, and the Railroading of George Zimmerman, and in 2019 edited the well-researched book (and film) The Trayvon Hoax.
The Times video opens with left-wing professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. saying, among other things, “The contemporary civil rights movement unfolded directly in response to the murder of Trayvon Martin.” The paper then flashes on the screen the label “Opinion.”
Of course, even “opinion” isn’t supposed to include statements widely known to be objectively untrue. And as Cashill points out, since Zimmerman was rightfully acquitted of murder, Gates’s statement is an admission that the “contemporary civil rights movement” is built on a lie.
Cashill then writes that in the video, “Barack Obama expressed his outrage at ‘the idea that this teenager who was walking down the street could be considered so threatening that a private citizen could initiate a confrontation resulting in that teenager’s death.’”
“Well, Trayvon wasn’t walking down the street,” Cashill continues. “He was lurking in the shadows on a rainy night in a housing development plagued with break-ins and home invasions by young black men, and Zimmerman did not initiate the confrontation.”
More shockingly still, however, the Times played in the video the following version of Zimmerman’s 911 call. “Hey, we’ve had some break-ins in my neighborhood and there’s a real suspicious guy,” Zimmerman could be heard saying. “This guy looks like he’s up to no good or he’s on drugs or something. He looks black.”
The problem? This is a doctored version of the 911 call, very much like one NBC notoriously peddled in 2012. The Times ought to have know this, too, since it covered the NBC deception, writing:
NBC News has fired a producer who was involved in the production of a misleading segment about the Trayvon Martin case in Florida.
The action came in the wake of an internal investigation by NBC News into the production of the segment, which strung together audio clips in such a way that made George Zimmerman’s shooting of Mr. Martin sound racially motivated.
The segment in question was shown on the “Today” show on March 27. It included audio of Mr. Zimmerman saying, “This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black.”
But Mr. Zimmerman’s comments had been taken grossly out of context by NBC. On the phone with a 911 dispatcher, he actually said of Mr. Martin, “This guy looks like he’s up to no good. Or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about.” Then the dispatcher asked, “O.K., and this guy — is he white, black or Hispanic?” Only then did Mr. Zimmerman say, “He looks black.”
(Hat tip: Def-Con News.)
Given this, question: Who will now be fired at the Times for what got the NBC producer fired?
The paper wasn’t done with its deceitful editing, either. It also played (almost, anyway) Zimmerman’s following exchange with the 911 dispatcher:
SPD: Are you following him?
GZ: Yeah.
SPD: Okay. We don’t need you to do that.
GZ: Okay.
The Times, however, edited out the “Okay,” “all the better to preserve the fiction that GZ was stalking Trayvon,” writes Cashill. In fact, Zimmerman complied with the dispatcher request and headed for an address where he was to meet the police.
In an article under the video, Times journalist Charles Blow brazenly equates Martin’s death with the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, writing, among other things, “Martin was just 17 years old, a boy, and he was where he was supposed to be.”
“He was unarmed,” Blow continues. “He was carrying Skittles and a can of iced tea.”
But, “No, Trayvon was not where he was supposed to be,” responds Cashill. “He had been exiled to the townhome of his father’s new girlfriend in Sanford, Florida, after being suspended from school for the third time that school year and kicked out of his mother’s home. Having been caught with stolen jewelry and burglary tools, Trayvon avoided arrest under the same misguided policy that allowed Nikolas Cruz free to kill 17 of his Parkland high school classmates a few years later.”
In fact, Cashill further states that Zimmerman was correct: Martin was high and bent on wrongdoing. He’d gone to the 7-11 not for some childlike snack but to get blunts and the ingredients for a drug concoction called “purple lean.”
Yet intensifying the innocent child angle, in its video the Times used a picture of Martin from when he was a cute young boy. In contrast, the 2012 criminal Martin was a half foot taller than Zimmerman and an aspiring mixed martial artist, Cashill notes.
What’s more, “Trayvon had four minutes to run 100 yards to the townhome where he was staying,” Cashill further informs. Instead, he played predator, circling to where Zimmerman was awaiting the cops and sucker punched the man. He was then seen by prosecution witness Jonathan Good, who testified that the teen was on top of Zimmerman, pummeling him with blows MMA style.
This continued, Cashill relates, for approximately 40 seconds. (Note here that men have sometimes died in street fights after only one punch.) Anyway, it was only then, in the midst of this relentless attack, that Zimmerman shot Martin.
It was because of the above facts that Zimmerman was acquitted by, as the Times puts it, an all-white jury. In reality, however, one juror was “an Afro-Puerto Rican,” Cashill tells us.
Interestingly, after Cashill contacted the Times, this still serious but relatively minor error was the only one the paper noted — by adding a post-credits “correction” about the “error.”
The paper’s executive producer of Opinion Video, Adam Ellick, sloughed off Cashill’s other points. He said the piece was “Opinion analysis of an event” that has already “been covered extensively.” And what about the doctored 911 call audio?
Ellick claimed that was done to conserve on time.
As to what’s still good to conserve at the Times, that is a real question. We’ve all heard the line, “It’s not the votes that count, but who counts the votes.” Well, it appears the “newspaper of record” believes that it’s not who makes the history that matters, but who compiles the history books.
If anyone wishes to watch the Times Trayvon tribute video, it is below.
