Left of center Slate calls out ABC on deceptively edited interview:
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The media are reporting that a juror says Zimmerman is guilty of murder. That’s not true.
By William Saletan|Posted Friday, July 26, 2013
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/frame_game/2013/07/did_george_zimmerman_get_away_with_murder_no_juror_b29_is_being_framed.html
Robin Roberts interviews Juror B29, the only minority juror from the George Zimmerman trial, on an episode of "Good Morning America" that aired July 26, 2013.
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ABC News hasn’t posted a full unedited video or transcript of the interview. The video that has been broadcast—on World News Tonight, Nightline, and Good Morning America—has been cut and spliced in different ways, often so artfully that the transitions appear continuous. So beware what you’re seeing. But the video that’s available already shows, on closer inspection, that Maddy has been manipulated and misrepresented. Here are the key points.
1. The phrase “got away with murder” was put in her mouth. Nightline shows ABC interviewer Robin Roberts asking Maddy: “Some people have said, ‘George Zimmerman got away with murder. How do you respond to those people who say that?’ ” Maddy appears to reply promptly and confidently: “George Zimmerman got away with murder. But you can’t get away from God.” But that’s not quite how the exchange happened. In the unedited video, Roberts’ question is longer, with words that have been trimmed from theNightline version, and Maddy pauses twice, for several seconds, as she struggles to answer it. “… George Zimmerman … That’s—George Zimmerman got away with murder. But you can’t get away from God.”
You have to watch her, not just read her words, to pick up her meaning. As she struggles to answer, she looks as though she’s trying to reconcile the sentiment that’s been quoted to her—that Zimmerman “got away with murder”—with her own perspective. So she repeats the quote and adds words of her own, to convey what she thinks: that there’s a justice higher than the law, which Zimmerman will have to face. She thinks he’s morally culpable, not legally guilty.
2. She stands by the verdict. ABC’s online story about the interview ends with Maddy asking, “Did I go the right way? Did I go the wrong way?” But that’s not the whole quote. In the unedited video, she continues: “I know I went the right way, because by the law and the way it was followed is the way I went. But if I would have used my heart, I probably would have [gone for] a hung jury.” In another clip, she draws the same distinction: “I stand by the decision because of the law. If I stand by the decision because of my heart, he would have been guilty.” At one point, she says that “the evidence shows he’s guilty.” Roberts presses her: “He’s guilty of?” Maddy answers: “Killing Trayvon Martin. But as the law was read to me, if you have no proof that he killed him intentionally, you can’t say he’s guilty.” That’s the distinction she’s trying to draw here: Killing is one thing. Murder or manslaughter is another.
3. She thinks the case should never have gone to trial. According to ABC News, when Roberts asked “whether the case should have gone to trial,” Maddy answered, "I don't think so. … I felt like this was a publicity stunt.”
4. The jury was not ethnically divided on Zimmerman’s culpability. Unlike Juror B37, who spoke to CNN, Maddy doesn’t say—at least not in the edited clips—that Zimmerman was a good man or that Martin shares the blame. But some white jurors seem to have shared Maddy’s feelings. “A lot of us had wanted to find something bad, something that we could connect to the law,” she says. “We felt he was guilty,” she adds in other comments quoted by ABC News. “But we had to grab our hearts and put it aside and look at the evidence."
5. Race wasn’t discussed, and she didn’t focus on it. Unlike Juror B37, Maddy knows what it’s like to be profiled. She says it has happened to her while shopping. But she withholds judgment as to the role of race in this case. Roberts asks: “How do you respond when you see people who are making this about race, who are saying, had Trayvon not been a young black man, that the conversation would be different?” Maddy tilts her head noncommittally and responds: “Is it true? That’s the question to be asked.” In another clip, Roberts says, “That was something that a lot of people from the outside thought must have been the discussion in the deliberations, about race, about color. But that wasn’t the case?” Maddy affirms, “It was not the case.” When the verdict was announced and she was released from sequestration, she was dismayed to discover the national outrage. “I didn’t know how much importance” was attached to the trial, she says, “because I never looked at color. And I still don’t look at color.”
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6. She was no pushover in the jury room. “I was the juror that was gonna give them the hung jury,” she says. “I fought to the end.” Roberts asks: “Did you feel a little, for lack of a better word, bullied in the deliberations?” ABC News seems to have cut the video here, so we don’t know what was taken out. But in the edited video, Maddy’s next words are, “I don’t know if I was bullied. I trust God that I wasn’t bullied.” Roberts asks, “Do you feel that your voice was heard?” Maddy assures her, “My voice was heard. I was the loudest.”
7. To the extent she feels racial or ethnic pressure, it’s against Zimmerman.In theNightline video, Roberts notes that Maddy could have hung the jury. Roberts asks: “Do you have regrets that you didn’t?” Maddy pauses, tilts her head, and thinks about it. “Kind of. I mean I’m the only minority. And I feel like I let a lot of people down.” In the GMA version, Maddy’s reference to being the only minority has been seamlessly edited out. But this theme returns in other clips. “I couldn’t do anything about it. And I feel like I let a lot of people down,” she says. And again: “I feel like I let ’em down. We just couldn’t prove anything.” She feels the anger and the cosmic injustice. But they don’t change her legal judgment.
8. Acquittal is not personal—or national—exoneration. This is what she’s really trying to convey. “Maybe if they would put [out] the law, and a lot of people would read it, they would understand the choices that they gave us,” she says. The tragedy of the case, and the long-standing sense of racial injustice that surrounds it, shouldn’t and didn’t dictate the verdict.
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This is NOT the first time ABC has tried to mislead the public about the facts:
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credit brumar |
