The Media and Public Discourse Theme Analysis

In Dear Martin, Nic Stone portrays the media as something that has a tremendous amount of influence over the way people talk and think about current events. Because Justyce’s encounters with violent police officers are related in a third-person narrative voice, readers know exactly what has happened—in both cases, Stone makes it clear that Justyce has done nothing to deserve the violent treatment he receives from the police. This makes it all the more startling when news programs suggest that he is a dangerous young man with gang affiliations who provoked the officers that attacked him. What’s more, Stone exposes a connection between the media’s dissemination of doubt or misinformation and the ways in which society responds to otherwise clear-cut instances of racism and discrimination. In turn, she showcases the contemporary media’s disconcerting power to affect public discourse, even when news outlets aren’t setting forth accurate accounts of reality.

At the climax of Dear Martin, Nic Stone uses a third-person point-of-view to narrate what happens when Manny and Justyce drive down the street listening to loud rap. As Manny pulls the Range Rover up to a stoplight, Justyce notices from the passenger seat that a white man in a nearby car is looking angrily at them, so he turns the music down. When the light changes, though, Manny turns the volume back up. At the next light, the man drives up to them and tells them to turn the music down, and when Manny refuses, the man calls them the n-word. “Hey, fuck you, man!” Manny yells, refusing to change the volume. Just then, the man pulls out a gun and fires shots into the Range Rover, killing Manny and wounding Justyce.

The fact that this entire encounter is narrated in third-person is noteworthy because it removes all uncertainty from the situation. Without a shadow of a doubt, readers know that Manny and Justyce did not pose a threat to the other driver, and yet he still shot them. However, Stone reveals several pages later that the media has been circulating “speculation[s]” that Manny threatened the shooter (Garrett Tison, an off-duty police officer). Theories have also been floated that Justyce had a gun and that he and Manny threw an object into Tison’s car. These accounts are quite obviously distortions of reality, but there’s little Justyce can do to disprove them, since he doesn’t have access to an attentive audience. In this way, Stone stresses the fact that the media can be quite influential, even—or perhaps especially—when spreading misinformation.

As the novel progresses after Manny’s death, Stone continues to showcase the power of the media to slowly but surely change the narrative surrounding such stories. It becomes quite apparent that the “speculations” about Manny and Justyce provoking Officer Tison have worked their way into the public discourse, inviting people to make unfair claims about the boys without actually supporting their statements. The media, it seems, have given these people a platform to express uninformed opinions, which is what happens when a newspaper prints a quote from Tison’s neighbor, who says, “The man was defending himself from thugs. I’ve known Garrett for twenty-five years. If he says those boys had a gun, they had a gun.”

In keeping with this, a news station gets hold of a picture of Justyce dressed up as a “thug” for Halloween, and though the costume was meant as a joke, the reporters take it at face value. Worse, the station invites an “anti-gang violence pundit” to analyze the picture. “I mean it’s obvious the kid was leading a double life,” the pundit says, referring to the supposed discrepancy between Justyce’s grades and the picture of him from Halloween. “You know what they say, Steven: you can remove the kid from the thug life…But ya can’t remove the thug life from the kid.” The conclusions this pundit so confidently draws are obviously unfounded and unfair, but this doesn’t stop him from spreading this message to anyone who’s watching—a fact that once again underlines the notion that Justyce is at the mercy of the media and the narrative slant it sets forth.

The events in Dear Martin are set against a backdrop of fictional events that mirror actual instances of racial profiling and police brutality. Shortly before the novel begins, an unarmed young black man named Shemar Carson is shot and killed by a white police officer, and though the officer claims that Shemar was reaching for his gun, there’s absolutely no evidence to suggest that this is true. Still, though, the media makes speculations that shroud the entire event in uncertainty and confusion. As a result, people like Jared unabashedly support the idea that the officer who killed Shemar is innocent. “Not every white person who kills a black person is guilty of a crime,” Jared says in class, defending Shemar’s killer. Frustrated, SJ criticizes Jared for getting all of his news from social media, but he remains unwilling to reconsider his opinion—a point that’s worth noting, since it indicates just how thoroughly media of all kinds can determine what people think.

Consequently, readers see why it’s such a big deal that the media uses an out-of-context picture of Justyce to portray him as somebody he’s not. “If there’s one thing Jus knows from the Shemar Carson […] case, it really doesn’t take more than a photo to sway mass opinion,” Stone writes, outlining the frightening idea that the media can manipulate the way the public thinks simply by presenting carefully selected photographs. This makes it even harder than it already is for disadvantaged young black men like Justyce to prove their innocence. Accordingly, Stone warns against the dangers of inaccurate and irresponsible reporting, which have the power to further disenfranchise targeted populations.