How the Liberal Media Wrote Its Own Doom in the Zimmerman Trial

Impact

Throughout the course of the Zimmerman trial, both liberal and conservative media outlets have done more than their fair share of reporting their angle of the story, with liberals advocating for a guilty verdict and conservatives pushing for not guilty. However, what most don't realize is that liberal media pundits caused their own demise before the trial even began.

From day one, media coverage of the Zimmerman case has been racially charged, particularly from liberal media outlets. The problem was that the actual case, from a legal standpoint, had nothing to do with race, and racial discrimination was hardly ever mentioned in the trial. Rather, the verdict was returned as a response to one question and one question only: whether the prosecution presented enough evidence to show beyond a reasonable doubt that Zimmerman committed second-degree murder or manslaughter when he shot and killed Martin.

Liberal news outlets attempted to twist this issue into an emotional and ethical civil rights question centered on race. Conservative news outlets focused instead on the lacerations on the back of Zimmerman's head and what little hard evidence the parties were able to gather for trial, all the while reminding the jury that Zimmerman was innocent until proven guilty and could not be convicted until there was not an ounce of doubt in any of the juror's minds that Zimmerman was guilty of second-degree murder or manslaughter. Unfortunately for liberal media pundits, their advocacy of a guilty verdict was based solely on an issue that was so legally irrelevant that it had no chance of receiving its day in court.

Thus it should come as no surprise that many lawyers didn't even blink an eye when they heard the verdict. While the media was playing a mind game with its viewers, detracting from the main issue and giving Martin supporters a false sense of hope that "justice" might actually be served, an overzealous prosecution was struggling to keep its head above water in the courtroom while wondering to themselves how they, too, got sucked in by the media and all its hype over self-created issues long enough to lose sight of the legal reality that they faced.

In retrospect it seems that liberal news outlets wrote their own doom long before the verdict was released Saturday night. While their goal was to seek justice for Martin through a 21st century civil rights movement of sorts, their efforts proved to be counterproductive, as they succeeded only in misleading the nation to believe that our justice system is in fact so broken as to allow a media-fabricated cause to trump the law.