Moving The Goalposts On The Zimmerman Case
07/15/2013
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A commenter writes(on my own blog)

Has anyone outside the Steve-o-Sphere noticed that, in typical fashion, the grounds for outrage keep subtly shifting?
Month 1- "A crazed white vigilante murdered an innocent, angelic boy!". Then it turned out that Martin wasn't so innocent or angelic, and was for all practical purposes a man, not a boy. Zimmerman was also revealed to be not so crazed and not so white. So that angle was dropped.

Later- "It's those awful 'Stand your Ground' laws, that's what's wrong!". But the defense didn't even need to mention that law at trial, because was totally irrelevant to the case. That line was abandoned pretty swiftly by the smart media players, though some stragglers still haven't wrapped their heads around it yet.

During the trial (after it became clear that there was no way to prove murder)- "Zimmerman recklessly provoked a confrontation, ignoring police instructions!". But police testified that he cooperated fully and followed all their instructions, and the jury subsequently agreed.

After the acquittal- "Anyone who is going to carry a deadly weapon should be more careful, and more knowledgeable!" i.e., GZ was a little bit of a bumbling incompetent, which is more-or-less true.


This kind of "outrage distillation" is common when the press push a bull***t narrative and then discover that they were mostly wrong. The can't continue lying, but they can focus the same amount of anger and opprobrium onto smaller and smaller sins.

 

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