Trayvon
Martin story found the media
By Paul Farhi, Published:
April 12, 2012
The Washington Post
It began as a routine
police-blotter item, a journalistic afterthought. On
Feb. 26, the Orlando
Sentinel’s online edition devoted a few
dozen words to the fatal shooting of an unnamed
teenager in the nearby town of Sanford. The story
also made the late news that night on WOFL,
the local Fox affiliate.
The Sentinel followed a day later with another
brief item, this one noting the young victim’s
name and age: Trayvon Martin, 17. The paper said it
wasn’t identifying the shooter, a man in his 20s,
“because he has not been charged.†The early
police accounts of the episode made it seem nothing
more than “a fight gone bad,†recalled John
Cutter, the Sentinel’s associate editor.
And then . . . nothing.
The national media didn’t descend on Sanford. Celebrities
didn’t tweet about the shooting. The cable pundits
didn’t start their debate about guns, race and Florida’s “Stand Your Ground†law.
For more than a week, the story teetered near obscurity, at
risk of becoming just another tragic but forgotten encounter
on a rainy night in central Florida.
It’s likely that Martin’s death, which resulted in the
arrest and indictment Wednesday of confessed shooter George
Zimmerman, would never have crowded into the national
consciousness had it not been for Martin’s family, its
lawyers and an enterprising PR man.
For the most part, the Martin story found the media, rather
than vice versa. Outraged by the lack of an arrest, the
Martin camp lobbied news outlets to examine what had
happened that night in Sanford. Eventually, the media did,
and the story moved like a fast-burning fuse, leaping from
traditional news sources to the blogosphere and social
media.
A pivotal, if little-known, figure in the Martin story’s
development was Ryan Julison, an Orlando
public relations executive who began working with the Martin
family at the behest of its attorneys, Benjamin Crump and
Natalie Jackson.
With the story fading, Julison began trying to revive
interest in it, emphasizing a storyline of an unarmed
teenager, a neighborhood watchman with a gun and the lack of
an arrest. He got few takers.
“There just wasn’t a lot of interest in this out of the
gate,†he said in an interview Thursday. “Oftentimes, it
seems like the media likes to follow instead of going first.
They want to wait and see someone else do the story and then
they get in line. But we were at zero. We had to keep going
from scratch.â€
Julison, who has worked on other high-profile stories, such
as acting as spokesman for John Travolta
after the death of his son, Jett, finally found two
takers: the Reuters wire service and CBS News.
Reuters moved a 14-paragraph story on the case March 7. The
next morning, “CBS This
Morning†aired a piece by reporter Mark Strassman in
which Trayvon’s father, Tracy, expressed his grief over
his son’s death and outrage that Zimmerman was still free
— two elements that would stoke the coverage for weeks.
“It was one of those stories that, when you hear the
pitch, you just say, ‘Wow, this has to be told,’ â€
said Chris Licht, executive producer of the morning program.
From the reaction afterward, he said, “We knew we’d hit
on something significant.â€
All at once, the two national
media reports seemed to give the incident the attention and
credibility Martin’s family had been seeking.
That morning, Julison organized a news conference in
Jackson’s law office in Orlando, featuring Crump and Tracy
Martin. The news conference generated more local coverage,
an Associated Press story and a piece in the Huffington
Post. Two days later, on March 10, ABC’s “Good
Morning, America†weighed in.
The fuse, now burning brightly, soon threatened to touch
off an explosion.
Members of the New Black Panther Party, a fringe group,
showed up in Sanford that weekend to protest Zimmerman’s
release from police custody. By Monday, the Rev. Al Sharpton
was talking about the Martin case on his syndicated radio
program and on his MSNBC show, setting off even more talk on
cable.
On cable talk shows, “hosts on both sides of the
political spectrum found something that fit their
perspectives,†said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the
Project for Excellence in Journalism, which had studied the
media coverage.
The left seized on the police not charging Zimmerman and on
the Martin family as symbols of civil rights, he said; the
right emphasized alleged liberal media bias in reporting the
story. According to PEJ’s data, MSNBC, which employs
Sharpton, has discussed the Martin case more than CNN or Fox
News.
A key twist in the story, said Julison, was the release on
March 16 of tapes of Zimmerman’s 911 emergency calls. The
tapes, which Sanford police had resisted releasing, gave
news outlets fresh material to report, and added another
emotional element to the story. One recording captured
screams for help in the background. “It humanized the
situation,†he said. “You hear people crying. You
can’t help but be moved by it.â€
By this time, the story had spread to social media, with
such celebrities as Spike Lee, Russell Simmons and Mia
Farrow tweeting their outrage, and LeBron James and his
Miami Heat teammates posing for photos in hoodies — the
garment worn by Martin at the time of his death.
The Martin family, in New York for an appearance on “The
Today Show,†also agreed to participate in a local rally
dubbed “The Million Hoodie March,†which drew enormous
media attention. President Obama finally seemed to certify
the story’s national significance March 23 when he
commented, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.â€
Julison, who worked on the story for no compensation, says
he always thought his clients’ case had merit, but the
outcome wasn’t guaranteed. “All of these things
worked perfectly,†he said. “They came out in
just the right sequence for us.â€
