Same as it ever was

The New Republic has a history of employing fabulists, so this correction is about par for the course:

This article has been corrected. Zimmerman called various law enforcement officials 46 times, not just 911, as originally stated. He made the calls over an eight-year period, not over the course of 15 months, as originally stated. The original sentence also cited a call Zimmerman made about a seven-year-old boy; the clause has been removed as it implied that Zimmerman was reporting suspicious activity. It appears that Zimmerman made the call out of concern. We regret the errors.

I really don't want to write about the Zimmerman case, but this sort of thing is so endemic that it's obligatory to call it out, especially since I'm still seeing people on my Facebook feed talking about Zimmerman profiling a 7-year-old boy. It's important to note something else; while one could assume a certain confusion between normal police calls and 911 calls, the author of the article, who is a law professor at Stanford University, certainly should know that calling the police non-emergency number about open garage doors and 7-year-old boys wandering around unattended is hardly the, ahem, profile of an, ahem, "an edgy basket case," or that an average of six calls a year to the police is hardly out the the ordinary. So other than arguing from falsehood, it's a pretty good article.

I suppose it would be uncharitable of me to say this, but I suspect that The New Republic regrets getting caught yet again more than they regret the errors. You would think that a magazine that employed Stephen Glass would be able to check easily verifiable facts in an article they published. You would be wrong, of course. 

Having said all that, The New Republic is hardly the only news outlet engaging in this sort of thing, as William Saletan of Slate notes:

Did George Zimmerman get away with murder? That’s what one of his jurors says, according to headlines in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and dozens of other newspapers. Trayvon Martin’s mother and the Martin family’s attorney are trumpeting this “new information” as proof that “George Zimmerman literally got away with murder.”

The reports are based on an ABC News interview with Juror B29, the sole nonwhite juror. She has identified herself only by her first name, Maddy. She’s been framed as the woman who was bullied out of voting to convict Zimmerman. But that’s not true. She stands by the verdict. She yielded to the evidence and the law, not to bullying. She thinks Zimmerman was morally culpable but not legally guilty. And she wants us to distinguish between this trial and larger questions of race and justice.

We're never going to be able to discuss the "larger questions of race and justice" if those orchestrating the discussion aren't willing to report things as they are, rather than as they want them to be.