Skittles and shell casings

I’m not going to lie. I can’t stand Fox News.

I’ve always been skeptical of what flows out of the mouths of these people who have the nerve to call themselves journalists. So it comes as no surprise that I found myself shaking my head in disagreement at their latest attempt to cover the Trayvon Martin shooting at the hands of George Zimmerman.

On June 10, the first day of the Zimmerman trial in which he has been charged with second-degree murder, Fox News host Jamie Colby and former federal prosecutor Doug Burns were discussing the possibility that Trayvon Martin used “a bag of Skittles and a can of iced tea” to attack Zimmerman. Burns later said that “you could break a bottle of iced tea...with a jagged edge and you could possibly kill somebody with it.”
Now, I’ve heard some pretty ridiculous claims from Fox News, but this is definitely in my top five.

Let’s get something straight — no one is sure who attacked who first, and even the thought of suggesting that an armed 30-year-old man acted in self-defense against an unarmed 17-year-old black boy on the grounds that he was acting “suspiciously” is completely out of line.
 
And just because Martin was found with a bag of Skittles and an iced tea bottle after he was fatally shot does not necessarily mean that he used them for any kind of violence whatsoever. Hell, if food were all it took to attack someone, the homicide rate in this country would be off the charts.

Another thing to consider is that no one will ever know if Martin would have used a broken iced tea bottle as a weapon. This is a 17-year-old kid who, for all anyone knows, had no prior training in any kind of combat. Even if he did muster the courage to break the bottle, he wouldn’t have done that much damage.

What this all adds up to is a news organization (if you can even call it that) that is blaming the victim simply because he was young and black.

Leave it to Fox News to continue to warp our perception of a misunderstanding gone terribly wrong, one that could have been avoided if Zimmerman had not jumped to conclusions so fast.

In my eyes, unless they decide to approach a story with the same level of objectivity as other news outlets, Fox News will always be nothing more than an unfairly biased noise machine.

­— tjollo@indiana.edu