SOCIETY DOWN: It’s time for Ben Jealous (and Crowley) to go!

SATURDAY, JULY 20, 2013

Interlude—CNN fails to perform: Geoffrey Canada is a very bright person.

Yesterday, we mentioned a comment he made on CNN about the Zimmerman verdict. “In my world, everybody saw this as open and shut,” he said, referring to the case against Zimmerman.

That was a rather strange comment. Plainly, the legal case against George Zimmerman was never open-and-shut. If Canada was right, why did so many people think otherwise?

Last night, we saw part of the answer. We watched CNN’s State of the Union program from last Sunday, the morning after the verdict.

Candy Crowley hosted the program and refused to perform basic journalism. Even by the low standards of cable, her performance was egregious.

To review the full transcript, click this.

Crowley spoke with a string of guests. With great frequency, these guests offered the simplified version of the killing of Trayvon Martin which has come to dominate many cable discussions.

Early on, she spoke with Rep. Chaka Fattah (D-PA). Below, you see his repeated account of what happened in Sanford that night:

FATTAH (7/14/13): If you take race out of this, what you have is a young person who died going to buy candy, who was innocent, was not involved in any criminal activity, and a person who officials had asked not to follow him took a gun and killed him. And now, that person will get his gun back. George Zimmerman will get that gun back.

He will be out, and I think the notion that the jury is saying to him that if he did the same thing again today, or tomorrow, or next week, or someone else did it, that there would be no punishment is not a great signal to send.

CROWLEY: So, you think the signal is that this was an injustice. You think there should have been a guilty verdict? Is that what you're saying to me?

FATTAH: I think that there's an innocent boy dead. A person was asked not to follow him and he took a gun and killed him. And yes, I think that there should be been a punishment for that and moreover, the fact this this gentleman will have his gun back, or others like him could go out and do the same thing tomorrow with a belief that our criminal justice system has now said that that's perfectly fine.

That that set of facts are fine. That if someone tells you not to follow a kid, that you follow him, that you get out of your car and you shoot him and you kill him, that that's OK.

Three times, Fattah offered this account of what happened in Sanford that night:

A young, innocent person went to buy candy. A person was asked not to follow him and he took a gun and killed him.

If Canada’s friends have heard that account, the case would of course seem to be open and shut. This is the obvious problem:

Fattah omitted the facts which made it clear, all along, that this case wouldn’t be open and shut. If Fattah has been offering that account to his constituents, those people have been misled.

Fattah was hardly the only guest who offered this bowdlerized account of what happened that night. Later, Crowley brought out her “legal panel,” with Tom Mesereau saying this:

MESEREAU: First of all, the case absolutely should have been prosecuted. You have an innocent 17-year-old doing exactly what he had every right to do who was gunned down as a teenager. I mean, come on. The case should have been brought and in many other jurisdictions and many other juries would have convicted Zimmerman in my opinion. I agree he had outstanding defense attorneys, Mark O'Mara and Don West did a terrific job. You also had very, very good prosecutors who were very passionate and dedicated to what they did but this case could have gone the other way somewhere else. The facts were there. This man took a gun. He wasn't a police officer. He decided to follow someone when he was advised not to. He set the stage for an altercation and then he shot this young boy dead who was doing nothing wrong.

This was Mesereau’s account of what happened:

An innocent 17-year-old who was doing nothing wrong was gunned down, shot dead.

That certainly sounds like it's open and shut! Illinois governor Pat Quinn added a familiar element:

QUINN: I agree with Trayvon Martin's father that his heart is broken. My heart is broken. And our faith is not broken, as Mr. Martin said. It's important that we really look at this stand your ground law. I don't think that's a good law. We don't have it in Illinois, and we don't want it. And I think also the idea of individuals with guns that are concealed that are told by the police not to do something, violating that police order, there's something really wrong when that happens. And I think lots and lots of people across our country feel that way.

Quinn’s heart didn’t seem to be broken. He was soon clowning about the greatness of the Blackhawks and the Bulls and predicting his own re-election. But he added a basic point to the account Crowley’s viewers received:

Zimmerman was violating a police order when he shot Martin.

If Canada’s friends kept hearing this account of the facts, they might naturally assume that the case was open and shut. Unfortunately, Fattah, Mesereau and Quinn were all misleading those people.

Crowley’s viewers were repeatedly told that Martin was doing nothing wrong at the time he was shot. But uh-oh! During the trial, the jury was told by the defense that Martin was banging Zimmerman’s head on concrete moments before he was shot. And the best-positioned eyewitness testified that Martin was beating Zimmerman MMA-style shortly before he was shot.

Now, we reach the incredible part. In the full hour of Crowley’s program, that claim and that testimony were never mentioned! The injuries sustained by Zimmerman were never mentioned either.

The injuries and the testimony meant that this case wasn't open and shut. But these basic elements of the case went AWOL from Crowley's show.

At the very start of the program, Crowley referred to Zimmerman’s “claim that he shot Martin in self-defense early last year.” But as her guests kept offering simplified accounts of what happened in Sanford that night, Crowley never asked them to reconcile their accounts with what is known about Zimmerman’s injuries or with the eyewitness testimony.

Those are the facts and the evidence which kept this case from being open and shut. On Crowley’s hour-long program, they simply didn’t exist.

On Crowley’s part, this represented a refusal to perform the basic tasks of her profession. When her guests gave highly simplistic accounts of the facts, she cast herself in the role of potted plant.

How absurd was Crowley’s overall performance? She opened one segment with videotape of James Davis, an angry Sanford activist. In this exchange, we see two basic elements of an ongoing media gong-show:

DAVIS (videotape): And we got a jury from this county, and ironically, the jury that they chose was a jury that didn't include any blacks at all, but I understand that that jury may have some Hispanics on it.

CROWLEY: That was community activist, James Davis, responding to the verdict. CNN's Alina Machado is in a predominantly African-American neighborhood in Sanford, Florida getting reaction. So, Alina, what reaction have you gotten?

If Davis was acting in good faith, he had paid so little attention to the trial that he didn’t even know the composition of the jury.

Incredibly, Crowley let his statement go. Instead of correcting his bogus, somewhat race-baiting statement, she threw to correspondent Alina Machado, who prefigured Canada’s later statement:

“People here seem to be in shock,” Machado said. We were out here right after the not guilty verdict came down and people were walking around. There was a very small group that had gathered near a house where there had been a verdict watch party in this community and that small group was primarily shocked. They were walking around kind of with a dazed look on their face. There were some people who were very angry.”

Why were those people shocked by the verdict? Could it be because they’ve been played—because they’ve persistently been misinformed about the full range of facts and evidence in this case? This case was never open and shut, unless you listened to the childish accounts offered by people like Mesereau and Fattah, with “journalists” like Crowley refusing to do their jobs.

This case was never open and shut, except within the lines of a tightly constricted version of what happened. If we want to be honest about it, it isn’t clear that Trayvon Martin was “doing exactly what he had every right to do” at the time he was shot.

But average people were told that, again and again, by roving bands of demagogues. People like Crowley and Anderson Cooper allowed them to do it. In the process, they were refusing to do their jobs.

Crowley’s first guest this day was Benjamin Jealous, head of the NAACP. Jealous may be well-intentioned and thoroughly decent, but he sometimes gets things wrong.

The last time we looked in on Jealous, he was pummeling Shirley Sherrod after Tom Vilsack fired her. On Crowley’s program, he worried about what young people will think about this case and the verdict:

JEALOUS: And we should listen for our young people and search with them when they ask, “How is it that young Trayvon Martin could be killed by George Zimmerman and George Zimmerman gets no time when Michael Vick got two and a half ears for killing dogs?” When a domestic violence victim in northern Florida shot warning shots in the air over the head of her attacker and got 20 years.

CROWLEY: Right.

JEALOUS: And it's important that we take the feelings of our young people very seriously, and we help them sort through this.

Yes, he actually said that.

Newsflash: This country is full of good, decent kids of every race and ethnicity. This country is full of good, decent black kids.

We see them in Baltimore every day. We think they're sensational.

All kids face hurdles on the way to becoming adults. Our nation’s brutal history gives black kids an extra set of hurdles.

Jealous may be the world’s nicest person. We will assume that he’s well-intentioned. But one of the problems these young people face involves the leadership of people like Jealous. These leaders simply won’t give them the full range of facts about what happened in Sanford that night, or about why the jury may have ruled as it did.

Why did Zimmerman get no time when Vick got two years for killing dogs! Let us guess that very few kids are asking that question without being prompted by Jealous!

There is an answer to that question, but it wasn’t permitted on Crowley’s program. People who love and respect black kids would ask Jealous and Crowley and so many others to move aside, go home, step down.

Crowley’s full rebuttal: Again and again, Crowley’s guests gave grossly simplified accounts of what happened in Sanford that night. Below, the highlighted passage represents Crowley’s lone attempt at rebuttal:

CROWLEY: So, you think the signal is that this was an injustice. You think there should have been a guilty verdict? Is that what you're saying to me?

FATTAH: I think that there's an innocent boy dead. A person was asked not to follow him and he took a gun and killed him. And yes, I think that there should be been a punishment for that and more over, the fact this this gentleman will have his gun back or others like him could go out and do the same thing tomorrow with a belief that our criminal justice system has now said that that's perfectly fine.

That that set of facts are fine. That if someone tells you not to follow a kid, that you follow him, that you get out of your car and you shoot him and you kill him, that that's OK.

CROWLEY: But the following was not a crime, obviously, and the killing, at least according to the jury was not. But Congressman Grijalva, help us here. Do you think that the U.S. justice system continues to be a racial divide that whites get a far better deal in the justice system than African-Americans?

In the entire hour, that highlighted statement represents Crowley’s lone attempt to challenge the Simplified Story which is being peddled to average people and even to children.

Following Martin was not a crime, the helpless non-journalist said. Because she refuses to do her job, it's time for this person to go.