Oh, CNN. You adorable rape apologists, you.
You may have heard about the Ohio trial of two high-school football stars who were accused of raping a 16-year-old girl and disseminating photos and videos of their crimes on social media. Here’s how CNN dealt with the announcement of the verdict, from Mallory Ortberg at Gawker:
One way to report on the outcome of a rape trial is to discuss the legal ramifications of the decision or the effect the proceedings may have on the life of the victim. Another angle reporters can take is to publicly worry about the “promising future” of the convicted rapists, now less promising as a direct result of their choice to rape someone.
Reporters at CNN today chose the latter technique. General correspondent Poppy Harlow, speaking to anchor Candy Crowley, had this to say about the verdict:
“Incredibly difficult, even for an outsider like me, to watch what happened as these two young men that had such promising futures, star football players, very good students, literally watched as they believed their lives fell apart…when that sentence came down…
…
It’s perfectly understandable, when reporting on a rape trial, to discuss the length and severity of the sentence; it is less understandable to discuss the end of two convicted rapists’ future athletic and academic careers as if it were somehow divorced from the laws of cause and effect. Their dreams and hopes were not crushed by an impersonal, inexorable legal system; Mays and Richmond raped a girl and have been sentenced accordingly. Had they not raped her, they would not be spending at least one year each in a juvenile detention facility.
It is unlikely that Candy Crowley and Poppy Harlow are committed rape apologists; more likely they simply wanted a showy, emotional angle at the close of a messy and sensationalized trial.
Perhaps Crowley and Harlow are not “committed rape apologists.” Could be it’s just a hobby for them. Could be our mainstream corporate media thinks there’s genuine sympathetic emotion to be mined from the “tragedy” of entitled athletes who got caught and convicted of a crime that so many other entitled athletes get away with, and Crowley and Harlow were being good corporate drones.
None of these are good things to be.
Right. Shame they weren’t commenting on the possibility of a “promising future” for the girl, who now is likely to have PTSD at least temporarily, will have a lump of time in her life she really, really probably won’t want to discuss with random people, and who might have this following her around as those pics and videos were posted to the internet and lots of people knew her name locally. That’s a lot to deal with under any circumstances.
But, of course, girls don’t get to have “promising futures”, by and large. No one expects much of them, right? Let alone girls lower down on the class ladder in a place where the sports heros are exclusively male and who are coddled.
I think that it’s symptomatic of a broader media culture that caters to power and privilege: after all, we’re talking about a media system that treats stories of civilian casualties of American military action as PR disasters rather than actually paying much attention to the victims and the impact of their deaths/injuried, say, on their immediate family. So yeah, male privilege, the fact that the newsroom is still a male-dominated environment, etc. influence the decision to make the story be about the impact of rape on the rapists and not on the girl who was raped.
http://slutwalktoronto.tumblr.com/post/45672122095/more-about-justice-and-less-about-revenge-on-reading#_= This sums it up for me.
http://m.quickmeme.com/meme/3teped/
I just think about if it had been any other crime… would there have been that lament… like if they had stolen a car, robbed someone, got in an accident while driving drunk, physically assaulted another guy, we all know that in most of those instances that they wouldn’t have framed it the way they did in this story (because I could see them perhaps framing a drunk driving car incident like that).
It is disgusting that they are portraying the convicted criminals this way.
The thing I find interesting is not so much that CNN decided to use this sort of outdated spin but that nobody in the company saw anything wrong with it and had sufficient clout to stop it.
Sadly, I don’t think it’s outdated at all, but an accurate reflection of the regression that has occurred in that department. For current data just visit any bastion of bro culture.
Interesting contrast on CNN-IBN: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=puxwtOV3_r8 Obviously, this is about an initial report, not a trial verdict and there’s some other problematic stuff, but both reporters (who are both female) are definitely calling out the victim blaming by the police.
Bending waaaaaayyyyyy over backwards to get my head around their coverage, could this have been an ill-conceived attempt to put the case in perspective for any other like-minded promising young athletes that might have been paying attention?
…so that maybe the takeaway will be something other than “don’t take pictures and post them online”?