Media bias in the Trayvon Martin case? CNN showed a clip about the case 41 times, MSNBC 13 times and Fox news 1 time.
The article explains that the more we see something on the news, the more likely we as human beings are to think it is a problem and to pay attention to it. That's why we may believe child abductions for example to be a huge problem, when statistically it really isn't. The article asserts that there is a responsibility which goes beyond merely reporting the truth when one selects which out of a hundred stories gets airtime. "Those of you who recall the headline are probably wondering what this could possibly have to do with the tragic case of Trayvon Martin. I'll outsource the full rundown to *Mother Jones*<http://motherjones.com/politics/2012/03/what-happened-trayvon-martin-explained>, but the quick version is this: On the evening of February 26, Trayvon Martin--an unarmed 17-year-old African American student--was confronted, shot, and killed near his home by George Zimmerman, a Latino neighborhood watch captain in the Orlando, Florida, suburb of Sanford. Zimmerman has not been charged with a crime. A large and growing<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/20/trayvon-martin-death-phone-call?newsfeed=true> body of evidence shows that Zimmerman, fancying himself some kind of community guardian, had concluded for no good reason that Martin was "suspicious," left his vehicle to pursue and accost the physically smaller teen, and then demonstrably lied about key details of the altercation that led to the shooting in his initial account to police. Instead of arresting him, police appear to have conducted a slipshod investigation, allegedly "correcting" witnesses whose version of events didn't jibe with Zimmerman's jaw-dropping claim that he had acted in self defense. As many have noted, it seems hard to believe Zimmerman wouldn't have immediately found himself in handcuffs had he shot a white teen under otherwise identical circumstances. On Monday, in response to widespread outrage about the police handling of the case, the U.S. Justice Department announced<http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504083_162-57400603-504083/feds-to-investigate-shooting-death-of-trayvon-martin/> it would be conducting its own investigation. [image: cable_crop.jpg] Between the shooting itself and the Justice Department's announcement, according to ThinkProgress<http://thinkprogress.org/media/2012/03/19/447289/all-major-news-outlets-cover-trayvon-martin-tragedy-except-fox-news/>, CNN ran 41 segments on the Trayvon Martin case. MSNBC ran 13. Fox News covered it only once. In itself, that's a matter of news judgment that could probably be defended. But I want to suggest that the disparity here may have something to do with whether one thinks institutional racism remains a serious problem in the United States. Conservatives often seem to think it isn't, and that if anything, the real problem is how often spurious charges of white racism are deployed by their political opponents, while liberals more often tend toward the opposite view. Maybe both groups are drawing justified inferences from the data they're seeing. Like child labor, institutionalized racism -- in the form of quiet bias as opposed to overt proclamations of white supremacy -- can be hard to detect and quantify rigorously. In both cases, the people closest to the problem have strong incentives to obscure and deny it. So people tend to fall back on what psychologists call the Availability Heuristic<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic>, a rule of thumb that says the frequency of an event should correspond to how quickly you can think of examples of it. We automatically pluralize anecdotes into data. Like much of our cognitive toolkit, it often misfires in the age of modern media--it's why people tend to be irrationally concerned with extremely rare threats, like child abduction by strangers, that draw disproportionate media attention. The tricky part, of course, is precisely in figuring out what level of attention is "proportionate." People hearing about cases like Trayvon Martin's will naturally tend to infer that for every such case that makes national headlines, there must be far more that don't--cases where police are far too quick to assume, even in the face of contrary evidence, that a young black male was a criminal or an aggressor. If the producers at your favorite news channel decide to give airtime to every similar case that draws some local press attention somewhere in the United States, you'll probably conclude that such cases are very widespread indeed. If, instead, they only do so when such cases are impossible to ignore, having already drawn intense national attention, you're more likely to conclude that the few cases you do hear about count as "news" only because they're such extraordinary outliers. The peculiar problem of the information age is that we now have access to far more true stories than any one brain -- evolved for life in groups of a few hundred -- can possibly process. Our natural tendency to extrapolate from the subset we're exposed to means we can wind up with wildly inaccurate views of the world as a whole, even when all the stories we hear are true. For people with a storytelling gift as powerful as Mike Daisey's, or a job that empowers them to choose which of a hundred newsworthy tales makes the evening broadcast, that implies a responsibility beyond the traditional obligation to speak the truth. What we need today are the right proportions of truth." ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Order the Adobe Coldfusion Anthology now! http://www.amazon.com/Adobe-Coldfusion-Anthology/dp/1430272155/?tag=houseoffusion Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-community/message.cfm/messageid:348944 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-community/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-community/unsubscribe.cfm
