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To: BobL
I would lie to get on that jury and then do all that I can so that Zimmerman walks.
You wouldn’t succeed in lying your way on; your opinion is too deeply felt. And even if you did, you would be living in the neighborhood where all those people who after Zimmerman’s hide would be after yours if you did what you say. Would you actually want that?
Zimmerman has a suit pending against NBC for maliciously broadcasting an edited version of Zimmerman’s conversation with the police dispatcher. The editing put in Zimmerman’s mouth an answer to one question which was actually voiced in answer to an entirely different question; it is an open-and-shut case of defamation. It may have been a tactical necessity for the Zimmerman legal team to delay that case until after the criminal case, but on the merits it is somewhere between sad and disastrous to do so IMHO. First because the legal team need the money, and second because what NBC did was a tort irrespective not only of the verdict of the jury in the criminal case, even of the actual guilt of Zimmerman in the abstract, assuming the two may be different. And NBC deserves to lose - big.

Not only does NBC deserve to lose, but the rest of journalism deserves to lose, too. You can’t sue “the rest of journalism,” but you might sue “the Associated Press and its members individually” - and that would come to pretty much the same thing. All of them have not only damaged Zimmerman, who wouldn’t even be on trial if he hadn’t been first convicted in the papers and on the TV news, they have damaged the public interest generally by making a fair trial problematic.

Let’s face it, the verdict of this trial will be controversial, because although everyone “knows” how it should come out, vast numbers of people “know” contradictory things. It seems exceedingly unlikely that that many people will change their mind. If Zimmerman is acquitted, journalism owes Zimmerman such a huge apology that you can be sure that none will be forthcoming. And if Zimmerman is convicted, in a trial that would not even have occurred if journalism had been honest . . .


16 posted on 06/13/2013 4:57:52 AM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion (“Liberalism” is a conspiracy against the public by wire-service journalism.)
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To: conservatism_IS_compassion

You’re probably right. The first thing they’ll notice is my skin color. The second thing they’ll notice is that I’m not on welfare...


23 posted on 06/13/2013 5:46:14 AM PDT by BobL (To us it's a game, to them it's personal - therefore they win.)
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