30 Mar 2012 10:10 am
Bloggers Cherry-Pick From Social Media to Cast Trayvon Martin as a MenaceFor the second time in a week, a conservative blog has published excerpts from what it described as a Twitter feed maintained by Trayvon Martin, the Florida teenager who was shot and killed last month by a neighborhood watch volunteer patrolling a gated community.The new blog post on the dead teenagers social media account, which features an image of him making an obscene gesture and quotes from a message that includes an abbreviation for an obscenity, was posted on The Daily Caller, a site founded by Tucker Carlson, a conservative pundit, and Neil Patel, who once worked as an adviser to former Vice President Dick Cheney.Like the sites previous post on another Twitter feed apparently maintained by Trayvon Martin, the information published on Thursday seems to have been selected to reinforce the argument that the victim of the fatal shooting was a menacing figure who might plausibly have been mistaken for a criminal. That impression is reinforced by the fact that while the post mentions and links to what appears to be a MySpace account set up by Trayvon Martin in 2009, The Daily Callers editors chose not to display any of the many photographs posted there that show him in a far softer light: holding up a birthday cake with his name on it, fishing with his father, dressed in a suit for his prom, looking excited to inspect an aircraft engine.Similarly, the selection of Twitter updates published on Monday by The Daily Caller was accompanied by what appears to be a profile photograph he used, in which he was wearing a grill, a type of removable dental jewelry associated with rappers, but did not show or discuss the eight other Twitpic photographs associated with and linked to from the account. Those images a bag of candy, a pencil drawing of the name Tray sketched by his girlfriend; a school lunch; a tattoo of his mother Sybrinas name; portraits of two girls; a football field; a new pair of sneakers which remain online even though the associated Twitter account has been closed, paint an image of a fairly ordinary teenagers life.The Daily Caller chose to publish this picture of Trayvon Martin:But not pics he had also posted online like these: Edited by MistyBlue, 30 March 2012 - 10:11 AM.