Snopes offers excellent insight into a currently circulating Internet meme that presents two tragic homicides - Trayvon Martin and Marley Lion - as having equivalency. Snopes rates the meme as a "mixture" of true and false, and proceeds to offer reasons why.
They start by noting that:
Marley Lion's murder was never associated with a public perception of 'justice denied' or the suggestion that his race was an element of either the commission or prosecution of his killing.
The Lion case started as a crime without a suspect, and several weeks later resulted in convictions of four suspects on a variety of charges related to their robbery and murder of Lion, really a local issue. The fact that Lion was white and the criminals black forms an irrelevant albeit controversial theme for the author of the meme.
Snopes continues that, of the roughly 16,000 U.S. homicides per year, those that "garner national attention involve political or social controversy... lurid details... celebrities... or victims such as pregnant women, mothers, and children who are perceived as particularly vulnerable and sympathetic."
In other words, the perceived bias in the Martin and Lion cases is more about us than the media. As a profit-driven industry, the press simply emphasizes those stories that attract viewership. If we're glued to the television watching OJ trying to escape arrest in slow motion, the news media will gladly feed us as much of that coverage as they can sell advertising for.
To me the Internet meme is really about three things: First, the ability of individuals through social media to create false linkage and a perception of reverse racism using two unrelated cases. Second, the willingness of the public to propagate the meme as news because of its lurid attractiveness and the social controversy it creates. And third, how much we need a return to true journalism that is not biased by advertising sales.