PBS Anchor Gwen Ifill Inaccurately Describes Zimmerman as 'White'

April 10th, 2012 9:58 PM

On Monday night’s PBS Newshour, anchor Gwen Ifill mangled the Trayvon Martin story by describing the shooter, George Zimmerman, as simply “white,” when he has a white father and a Latino mother. By that one-white-parent standard, you could call President Obama “white.”

Ifill announced "Martin, who was black, was on his way to a convenience store in a mostly white gated community when George Zimmerman, who is white, shot and killed him after a disputed altercation." Martin was painted as “carrying only candy and a soft drink" and "was discovered by police lying face down in the grass.”

Ifill also featured former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush lamenting that Zimmerman's case does not fit the "stand your ground" definition -- “Stand your ground means stand your ground. It doesn’t mean chase after somebody who’s turned their back,” he said last month in Texas. But does Bush or Ifill know whether or not Zimmerman was under attack? There was no mention of injuries to Zimmerman's head described in the police report that was filed that night.

"The dispute over the killing of Trayvon Martin has sparked a national debate about race, justice, and when it is reasonable to act in self-defense," Ifill insisted. "Instead of dying down, the protests over the Martin case are continuing." These are disputes and protests avidly promoted by liberal networks who plucked this singular crime out of a national haystack because it fit their racist-America template.

Ifill turned to a liberal expert, Daniel Webster of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health to question "Stand Your Ground" laws -- and Michael Bloomberg is a major opponent of the National Rifle Association and gun-rights advocates. But for some reason, PBS excised the word "Bloomberg" out of the school's title.