CDM President Trump is castigated for calling out “fake news” as “the enemy of the people.” Yet he is correct, and journalists reinforce Trump’s view on an increasingly frequent basis.
For the Washington Post, “Democracy dies in darkness” yet for the American people, their faith and trust in media is dying, not in darkness, but in the light of day, right before our eyes.
I had the recent opportunity to watch filmmaker Joel Gilbert’s latest film, The Trayvon Hoax. Joel demonstrated a long-lost art, investigative journalism, and he did it in a fun and entertaining manner. Unlike cable news gabbers who get their talking points from echo chamber left-wing distributions networks like the former JournoList, Joel examined phone records, photos, and yearbooks. He knocked on doors and actually talked to people.
Once upon a time this would be called gumshoe journalism, walking around, investigating, putting in actual effort. Modern journalists only use their thumbs, checking Twitter and reporting tweets as verified news.
Gilbert’s film, aside from debunking the Trayvon Martin hoax, demonstrated how journalism should be done, in contrast to the shoddy reporting that now passes for journalism. This hoax was relatively small in scale, including creating a false witness to testify against George Zimmerman, but the implications of this hoax were huge and continue to this day, long after the 2012 shooting.
The Trayvon hoax spawned racial strife on a scale not seen in decades. From “hands up don’t shoot,” to the Ferguson effect of police backing away from traditional policing activities, to the detriment of poor and minority neighborhoods. We were treated to Freddie Gray, Jussie Smollett, and kneeling professional athletes. Political careers were born after the Trayvon hoax including attorney Benjamin Crump and the almost-governor of Florida, Andrew Gillum, just as the Tawana Brawley hoax thrust Al Sharpton onto the national stage several decades ago.
Big media played its part in the Trayvon hoax as in NBC doctoring George Zimmerman’s 911 call to make Zimmerman appear a racist, providing a racial angle for his self-defense shooting of Trayvon Martin. CNN referred to Zimmerman as a “white Hispanic” to keep the race angle front and center. Did they ever refer to Barack Obama as “half black” given the white skin color of his mother?