September 26, 2023
Two weeks ago, I had breakfast with George Zimmerman — yes, that George Zimmerman, the Florida man whose life was ruined by a national media eager, as always, to highlight the killing of a black person by a white man.
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Within a week or two of Trayvon Martin’s death, the media had transformed the innocent, Hispanic, Obama-supporting civil rights activist Zimmerman into the poster child for white nationalism.
In my 2013 book, “If I Had a Son”: Race, Guns, and the Railroading of George Zimmerman, I document all the editing tricks Big Media — NBC, ABC, CNN, the New York Times — used to pull off this evil alchemy. As a result, ten years after his acquittal, having narrowly survived one assassination attempt, Zimmerman continues to live a life in the shadows.
I cite the Zimmerman case to illustrate the spectacular lack of self-awareness shown by the Washington Post in its reluctant coverage of the mid-August murder of Andreas Probst, the retired police chief mowed down while biking in Las Vegas.
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The headline of the Post article by Aaron Blake, “Elon Musk, a ‘bike crash’ and the ever-anxious mob,” gives the game away. Rather than analyze the motives behind Probst’s murder, or the reasons for the media’s failure to cover it, the Post takes aim at the one man most responsible for keeping free speech alive: Elon Musk.
Two days later, on September 25, the New York Times finally deigned to cover the Probst murder but took precisely the same tack as the Post. Its headline read, “Outdated Headline in Las Vegas Paper Unleashes ‘Fire Hose of Hatred.'” The Times also took aim at Musk.
If Musk is the villain of these two articles, the victims are the Las Vegas Review-Journal and its crime reporter, Sabrina Schnur. According to Blake, “Musk promoted the idea that the Las Vegas Review-Journal had underplayed the heinous killing of a White former police chief.”
The video of the Probst murder first surfaced on social media on September 15 and circulated widely on September 16. On Sunday, September 17, Musk tweeted, “An innocent man was murdered in cold blood while riding his bicycle. The killers joked about it on social media. Yet where is the media outrage? Now you begin to understand the lie.”
“The more hateful, directed personal attacks came Sunday,” said Schnur. To further implicate Musk, Blake slipped in the notation, “after Musk’s Post.” Schnur continued, “Those people didn’t want to hear facts or argue over the story. They wanted a representative of the media to hate, and the comments were sexist, racist (about the passenger and victim’s skin colors), anti-Semitic and just more ruthless about me personally.”
If the people were angry, it is because the media were suppressing facts. They did not need Musk to fuel their outrage. The video did that, and yet two days after it surfaced widely, the major media remained mum. By contrast, two days after the George Floyd video surfaced, Minneapolis was in flames, and the media were all but egging on the arsonists.
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In his tweet, Musk made no mention of the Review-Journal, let alone Schnur. I wrote a piece in the American Thinker on September 16, published on September 17, before Musk even tweeted. In that piece, I made no mention of the Review-Journal, either. What I did note is that the Las Vegas media had seen the horrifying video of Probst’s murder weeks before Musk did.
On August 31, the Review-Journal published an article headlined “Retired police chief’s death a homicide after video emerges, police say.” Of note, the video of the murder is discreetly embedded in the article. For the next two weeks, the Review-Journal kept the video under wraps and, in so doing, suppressed its racial implications. If the killers had been white and the victim black, the editors would have been accused of malpractice — or worse — had they failed to release the video.
Blake makes an elaborate case that critics faulted the Review-Journal for using the phrase “bike crash” to describe the incident, given that the Review-Journal used it before the video surfaced. Among the cited “right wing influences” to mock the term “bike crash” was Canadian intellectual Jordan Peterson.
My beef, and Musk’s as well, however, was the failure of the media writ large to change their narrative even after the video surfaced locally on August 31. “For the next two weeks,” I wrote, “what happened in Vegas stayed in Vegas. I could find no mention of Probst’s murder beyond Las Vegas, and the local coverage was embarrassing in its relentless focus on bicycle safety. They showed no interest in the motives behind the thrill kill or the potential racial angle.”
In that same article, I observed, “Based on available evidence, both visual and audio, it appears that the driver is white and his accomplice black.” The accomplice, Jzamir Keys, is black. That much was not hard to discern. His arm was visible in the video.
Then, too, when the driver said, “Ready?,” Keys, manning the camera, said in black argot, “Hit his ass.” After Probst was struck, he added, “That n—– got knocked out.”
Predictably, Blake scolded “online commenters” for deducing that “the two men in the car were Black.” In fact, the driver, Jesus Ayala, turned out to be Hispanic, presumably a “white Hispanic,” the neologism the New York Times famously coined to stigmatize George Zimmerman once they learned of his Peruvian mother. In its belated article on the Probst case, the Times failed to even mention the names of the killers. To do so would have suggested their ethnicity.
Having gotten to know George Zimmerman over the years, I marvel at the Post’s sanctimony. Blake dares to complain about Musk’s failure “to do the most basic research” or the right’s “thinly constructed claims” about the media’s coverage of racial crime, but his bosses have never apologized to Zimmerman for destroying his life.
For the eighteen months between Trayvon Martin’s death and Zimmerman’s rightful acquittal, the Post and its allies fueled their audiences’ empty heads with enough hateful disinformation to give birth to Black Lives Matter. And America has never recovered.
Jack Cashill’s new book, Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America’s Cities, is available in all formats.
Image: Daniel X. O’Neil via Flickr, CC BY 2.0.
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