that's a hard post to follow ;) but thought I would mention that the City Council of Sanford passed a vote of no confidence in the police chief. That doesn't make everything ok, but i's nice to know that public outrage is having an effect. Cause I think Sanford has been that kind of town for a long time.
http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/03/21/2706876/sanford-commission-votes-no-confidence.html On Thu, Mar 22, 2012 at 3:50 AM, Vivec <gel21...@gmail.com> wrote: > > 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:348945 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-community/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-community/unsubscribe.cfm
