Why Lots Of People Think The Media Is Wrong About The Trayvon Martin Case

Michael Brendan Dougherty 

Let's just air it out now. 

Increasingly the outrage over the death of Trayvon Martin in Florida is turning into a debate about what really happened.

A lot of people think there is something (or many things) wrong with the conventional story of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed black teenager who was shot in Florida by a man named George Zimmerman, and the national drama that has followed it. 

Some people don't believe the original telling of the story in which Martin was innocently strolling home from a 7-11 back to his father's house, when a paranoid racist neighborhood watchman profiled him, called the cops on him, and chased him before shooting and killing him, only to be let go by bumbling or racist cops. 

Why don't they believe it? 

They remember the outrage about the Duke Lacrosse rape story, in which white students were accused of raping a black woman, turned into a feeding frenzy, and indicted in the public mind of heinous racism and abuse when they weren't guilty of much other than being pigs. 

They are suspicious of any story that attracts the moralizing of Al Sharpton, owing to his association with things like the Tawana Brawley case, in which a New York girl claimed to have been sexually assaulted and abused and then was later found to have been lying.

The Trayvon skeptics notice that liberal commentators are blaming conservatives like former Florida Jeb Bush, for signing a "Stand Your Ground" Law that seems sensible to them. Suddenly conservatives are being cast by liberals as on the opposite side of "the debate" about Trayvon Martin, and many are playing the role. 

Conservative commentator Michelle Malkin has pushed back against certain parts of the media story on Trayvon Martin. 

They are outraged at the scorn heaped on Zimmerman, who, according to Reuters, has been receiving death threats, and calls for a bounty on his head. Spike Lee even tweeted out Zimmerman's home address. 

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