Trayvon Martin a 17 year old, that was shot on February 26 in Sanford Florida by George Zimmerman. The next day his death was a top story on the Fox- affiliated television station in Orlando, the closest big city to Sanford. By the weekend it was being covered by newspaper across state, but it took some time before the rest of the country had found out. It was in mid March, after the news had been spread over face book and twitter. The Mr. Martin’s name is known as a testament to his family, which hired a tenacious attorney to pursue legal action and persuade sympathetic members of the media to cover the case. Many of the national media figures who initially devoted time to the shooting are black, which to some is a case study in the need for diversity in newsrooms.
As the case was catapulted onto the national agenda and calls for Mr. Zimmerman’s arrest increased, prominent black journalists and commentators wrote about it in highly personal terms. “This is the fear that seizes me whenever my boys are out in the world: that a man with a gun and an itchy finger will find them ‘suspicious,’ ” Charles M. Blow of The New York Times wrote on March 17. And on television, the family spoke early to the Rev. Al Sharpton, the civil rights activist who has radio shows and an MSNBC television show about the shooting by Mr. Crump that cause the death of a Florida boy at a boot camp in 2006, Rev who had previously speak out against it.
Now the Martin’s family has publicly thanked the media for paying attention, and Mr. Martin’s father told Gayle king on CBS last Friday “the world knows Trayvon now.”
