State of Florida vs. George Zimmermann: the media focus on the interaction of racial and legal issues

The trial of the Neighborhood Watch volunteer George Zimmerman (July, 2013) for the fatal shooting of the unarmed Trayvon Martin, closely followed in the U.S, became one of the most racially-charged, and apparently most politically motivated, prosecutions in recent U.S. history (Adjei, Gill 2013, Bhandaru 2013). Amidst the growing media frenzy and active participation of the public, a whirlwind of controversy and political debate surrounded the reports of this murder. The national media soon seized on the shooting, initially covered by the Florida media alone, and race was reported as central to the tragedy –Trayvon Martin being described as a 17-year-old “black male” and George Zimmerman as a 29-year-old “white Hispanic”. Police quickly released Zimmerman, since his behaviour was legally acceptable according to Florida’s controversial “stand your ground” law (a self-defense law). Only after nearly 450,000 people signed an online NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) petition, a process against Zimmerman for second-degree murder was started which ended up with his acquittal, grounded on the “stand your ground” law. Key issues at stake in this story are racial profiling, due process and the failure of self-defence laws in many states to keep up with the U.S. violent realities. Taking place in Florida’s controversial criminal-justice system, this trial had a disruptive impact on societal values and belief systems, which also found expression in the sensationalized reports of the media. News media are often able to favour particular value positions (affectual and judgmental), while employing a relatively impersonal style in which evaluations and other potentially contentious meanings are largely confined to material attributed to quoted sources (White 2005, 2012). By exploring the (print) media coverage of this story from a discourse analytical perspective, where legal and sociological debates are involved (Babacan et al. 2009), the present study thus aims at providing a socio-critical interpretation of how the media discourse/s contributed to inflame racial passions, and to generate new and potentially disruptive social dynamics. At the same time, this study attempts to highlight how changes in society mean that legislation is no longer able to cope with a nation where, by 2020, the word ‘minorities’ will lose its present significance. Qualitative samples from the US press media (The New York Times and Orlando Sentinel) will be analyzed and the legal and socio-cultural implications discussed. The present work investigates a selection of print media reports on the killing of Trayvon and related events, in order to highlight how crucial the management of a variety of perspectives can be to effective journalistic communication. The media coverage of the killing of Trayvon Martin and Zimmerman’s trial can be more deeply understood if situated within the discursive practices used by journalists and other professionals to shape events according to socially organized ways of seeing and understanding events (Goodwin 1994). A famous and much investigated precedent is the 1992 trial of four white Los Angeles policemen charged with beating Mr. Rodney King, an African-American motorist who had been stopped for speeding. A videotape of the beating (made without the knowledge of the officers by a local witness from his balcony) became a politically charged theatre for contested vision (Goodwin 1994). The footage (showing five officers striking King repeatedly, while other officers stood by) was aired around the world, and raised public concern about police (mis-)conduct towards minorities. This line of events is still painfully open and productive –the recent killing of Michael Brown (August 9, 2014) in Ferguson (Mo) being a notable example. There are similarities between the 2013 Zimmermann trial and the 1992 Los Angeles policemen trial in so much as both show how the human ability to see/gauge a momentous event does not simply rely on a transparent cognitive process, but is rather a socially situated activity accomplished through structured practices. Furthermore, from different visual perspectives, other and even contrasting scenarios can easily be shaped in such and similar cases – even more so in the contemporary web-wired, multimedia, g/local arena, which allows events and related information to resonate in real time beyond socio-geographic constraints. One relevant example is the letter of Trayvon Martin’s mother to the Brown family: ‘‘If They Refuse to Hear Us, We Will Make Them Feel Us” (Time Magazine, 18 August 2014), which immediately created a virtually visible, empathic bond between the two events. The present analysis moves along two related lines of analysis, encompassing both Affect-provoked Judgment (Martin and White 2005; White 2012 a), and Attribution (White 2012 a, b). The major focus is on the interplay of directly-quoted or indirectly-reported speech that journalistic writers use to attribute viewpoints and versions of events to a variety of external sources. Thus, viewed from the Appraisal Framework perspective (White 2012 a), attribution is concerned with the linguistic resources by which speakers/writers include, and adopt a stance towards, what they represent as the words, observations, beliefs and viewpoints of other speakers/writers. This is an area which has been widely covered in the literature under such headings as […] “direct and indirect speech”, “intertextuality” and, following Bakhtin, “heteroglossia”. […] At its most basic, this attribution or intertextual positioning is brought into play when a writer/speaker chooses to quote or reference the words or thoughts of another. Including and attributing a proposition implies that the writer finds it relevant to the ongoing communicative event, as will be clarified in the methodology section.