Is anybody else absolutely disgusted with CNN over this?

So I just followed up on the rape case in Ohio after hearing bits and pieces about it but never really getting that into it. I've dealt with a couple of rapists in my line of work and it continually sickens me, so I try to leave some aspects of work life and home life segregated from one another for my own sanity. When watching it I realized that the comments made by the reporter from CNN, Poppy Harlow, were sympathetic to the two rapists and were obviously trying to gain sympathy for them from the audience watching. Two underage males that date raped a drunk 16 year old girl and violated her while she was unconscious and this fucking BITCH is being sympathetic to them.

Copy/paste quote follows; "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, [Ma'lik] collapsed in the arms of his attorney...He said to him, 'My life is over. No one is going to want me now.'"

Then there's a quote in there somewhere that's supposed to pull on our heart strings about an alcoholic father saying he wasn't there enough and he loves his rapist son... Yeah... Fuck off.

Finally we get to fat Crowley, and judging by how heartless she is it wouldn't shock me if she was a relation to Aleister Crowley. She asked, "What's the lasting effect though on two young men being found guilty in juvenile court of rape essentially?" completely ignoring the effect that a rape can have on a young woman. I've talked to a woman that was raped about 4 years ago and she told me she still has night terrors. It ruined her engagement. It ruined her life. She had to move to an entirely different city and she still sees shadows in the dark. Since when are we supposed to show sympathy for a fucking rapist, murderer, pedophile, and on and on and on? No matter how young they are.

I hope these two get hit in the face with a brick. As for the two rapists they'll get theirs. Sex offenders are the lowest form of scum in prison and the same is true for juvenile hall. Men that violate and hurt women deserve a special kind of torture. It's fucking disgusting that a news outlet would try to garner sympathy for them.

Discuss, because I sure as hell am not going to.

I am, but somehow, someway Fox News beat them in that department by actually saying the name of the victim on one of their broadcasts.

Ethics in journalism is dead.

Its kinda amazing how ok some people are with rape. I just saw one on Imgur of a girl who was drugged. She asked her friend to take her home as she wasnt feeling well. She said no. Next thing she knew she came to somewhere wearing no panties. She told the bitch friend about it, guess they both knew the guy who did it. Her friend said not to make a fuss cuz she wanted to get with the guy who just raped her friend.

SVU will have a field day with this

What do you expect from cable news? Actual journalism? That'll be the day!

I'm disgusted with you over this paragraph. I'll say that much.

More than that, they insulated she is flippant to the boy's misery by happily going to practice and doing school stuff while those two go through a trial and end up in jail.

@drdarkstryfe: CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News all did it, in print I think but never verbally. Then they immediately edited it in the future so the name wouldn't show up. They're all guilty of that.

I swear to God. I hear two instances of MSNBC editing footage for their own agenda, Fox being just way the fuck out there, now this from CNN. Then compound onto all of that the complete exploitation of Sandy Hook (I'm not saying don't report it, but do it with a little dignity instead of trying to maneuver cameras to look inside a funeral home/church to watch the funeral proceedings). At this point freedom of the press needs to go away because this shit is getting out of hand.

@video_game_king: Good. Was it the brick hitting face part? The little tidbit about sex offenders being the lowest form of scum behind bars? Men that hurt women deserving a special kind of torture? All of the above?

Oh how I hope it was all of the above.

you need to calm down... obviously people feel sympathetic towards the girl, and maybe the reporter shouldn't have laid it on so thick, but rapists aren't right in the head. I also think that they should have the chance at redemption, because they're still fucking teenagers dude. Teenagers are fucking dumb. These were dumber than most, obviously, and deserve what's coming to them, but not believing in redemption is way too cynical for me.

pffffffhahahaha

Fox, CNN, et al do not practice journalism. Insinuating that they do is an insult to legitimate journalists everywhere. They practice sensationalism. Thinking of these outlets like you would a movie studio paints a pretty accurate picture of how they operate.

Apparently you cannot have sympathy for terrible people.

Rape is fucking shitty but I cant lie and say I actually care about this. Will never think about this story again after leaving this thread. Fuck CNN.

It's not as bad as the Michael Crook guy saying rape doesn't exist and they girl deserved it.

I didn't even finish it. What? Oh man, those poor rapists. How dare they convict them? Their lives might be ruined? Poor rapists. Maybe they should arrest the victim for actually talking to somebody about what happened to her. But to see the two promising football stars arrested brings me to tears. Imagine how many other girls they could have raped? What a shame.

Seriously? What the fuck is going on?!

@animasta said:

Dumb teenagers steal stuff, drink, do drugs, fight... they don't gang-rape people. Sexual assault just isn't forgivable.

Just wow. Wonder what kind of connections the perpetrators' families have to the media for them to be receiving so much sympathy?

Fuck your whitey media.

Uhhhh. It's not about that, bro. The anchors focused almost entirely on how this will affect the rapists future and their families rather than the girl who was raped by multiple guys (read: pieces of shit). Their future is pretty set in stone and it's entirely their fault. The victim is who should be given sympathy by these anchors.

I can understand how it's sad to watch these guys ruin their lives, but that's just it, they ruined their lives. No one else did it for them. It's called living with the consequences of your actions. Accountability. Responsibility. I'm not defending them at all, I'm just saying that I can understand how people can look on with disappointment to see how they threw everything away over such a dumb decision.

As has been mentioned earlier in the thread, the lasting effects of this crime likely won't ever let that poor girl have peace of mind ever again. I'm not going to pretend like I understand the mental trauma they go through, but I have heard that the victims are messed up for life and have severe trust issues as a result, strained relationships/marriages, etc. It is terrible and so sad.

I think this is a situation where it's okay to use the description of "chauvinist pigs". There is no justification for rape. Ever.

Yea, pretty much. Is torturing and abusing them going to unrape the woman they raped?

I don't condone rape, but when you see young boys with bright futures worlds falling apart over a teen mistake it's upsetting.

EDIT - I just read a little more about the evidence and circumstance, yeh no sympathy here.

@aiurflux said:

We're not supposed to show sympathy, we should condemn such scumbags, but we're also not supposed to immediately burn every culprit at the stake, completely disregarding the million social and psychological factors that our sciences and research have taught us. You sound like you'd say the same thing about witches if you lived in the middle ages.

But heeey it's too sensitive and tricky to actually think about what kind of guy(s) and girl(s) were involved, consider any circumstances or actually realize that we're not them so we're not in their shoes, and we need our daily fix of spouting sentences that make us feel good about ourselves so fuck the rapists and murderers to hell! Disgusting and outrageous and they should know better! I'm a great person, I can feel it now.

Keep in mind I'm not talking about these two guys, I watched the video and clearly they're fully to blame, I was responding to your very general question.

Yeah what they did was horrible and the sympathy the media seemed to have for them rather than the victim was gross but no one deserves to be tortured.

@MariachiMacabre Except those news anchors are doing the best thing for the victim by not mentioning her. Anonymity is the best thing for victims still in trauma from any criminal behavior. I think there is a good argument for not having any of the court preceedings being televised to ensure the victim relives none of those past events, but the news industry has structured it's profitability around covering EVERYTHING. Are they immoral for doing this? Maybe, but they're only reacting to the market (people following this story, including everyone in this thread) and it's demands (knowing what the fuck happens to the two rapists).

So let's not beat around the bush with what's actually going on; this is all about mob mentality making sure there is salt in the wound. These assholes got their punishment in full. Too bad justice is not nearly fulfilling as revenge. Now that consequences those two kids will receive is set in stone, the internet needs something else to feel the high of people getting put in their place. The cable news outlets are a good punching bag in this regard. Unfortunately these same people don't see that they are the ones creating what they hate.

I think people are being seriously mislead with the use of the word rape in this story. A 16 and a 17 year old male fingered a 16 year old female while she was was heavily intoxicated, to the point where she doesn't remember the event. Other people did see it happen, though, which is why they were charged. Now I'm not defending that, it's still some awful shit to do to someone and they absolutely should serve time, but I don't believe it fits the punishment that the original poster seems to be hoping for.

I hope these two get hit in the face with a brick. As for the two rapists they'll get theirs. Sex offenders are the lowest form of scum in prison and the same is true for juvenile hall. Men that violate and hurt women deserve a special kind of torture.

And it certainly doesn't fit the punishment of being a registered sex offender for the rest of their lives, and having that show up on every background check for every job that they'll ever put in for. That sort of thing just makes it impossible to ever hope to turn your life around, no matter how much you might have changed and grown as a person.

So I have to jump to massive conclusions to have an opinion on this I guess?

I mean a 16 year old... at a party... with alcohol. No chance she could of just got drunk and regretted having sex. I mean it's completely out of the question that a 16 year old, who's family or boyfriend or whoever would be pretty pissed off with her that she had drunk sex, could of possibly lied about rape.

Oh wait she's a woman? Fuckign bastard men how dare they!

If we didn't have the internet where would we yell all our disgust at? I don't think the nations cats could take it.

This can only end with someone calling someone else a variation on "rape hitler" and that's not a future I can raise my cats in.

There's no excuse for what they did. I don't think the reporter was trying to imply that. I guess what I think she was trying to get across was that she feels bad about the fact that these kids just ruined their lives by making a gigantic mistake. It's sad to know that they made one, colossal mistake that will forever alter their lives and limit whatever potential they might have had. That doesn't mean that they are any less guilty or that they should pay any less for their crime. Someone can shake their head and feel sad for a wasted life and still feel that that individual is completely responsible for what they did. Not everything is always black and white. A guilty, piece of shit person can still be offered sympathy even if they are 100% responsible for what they did and should pay for their crime.

I feel bad for the girl who got raped.

Watching a kid break down in tears makes me feel bad too, though. Guess I'm a bad person for having sympathy for bad people or something.

This really isn't the place to be determining what constitutes as fitting the definition of 'rape' or not dude. That's a big can of worms that will lead to only bad places.

You might be right if anyone actually had sex (only fingering was involved), or if the victim claimed to remember the event, or if there weren't male witnesses, or if the defendant didn't take pictures of the drunk naked girl.

Geez, am I the only one who reads about a case like this before commenting?

What does it matter? The court room had all of the relevant information and they were found guilty. Second guessing the verdict is irrelevant to reality and this thread.

Not to mention assuming the victim is at fault is pretty fucking reprehensible. As someone else in the thread say it's like that Michael Crook asshole claiming that rape doesn't exist and that this was her fault for wearing a skirt. Because, you know, men shouldn't be held responsible for their actions because they don't know any better. They're barely above animals. Oh wait, they're human being who think for themselves and have self control and live in a modern society? Oh, shit. Guess it really was their fault after all.

I was given no information about what happened. Only some 6 minute video, where they were sympathizing with the two men. Along with that I know that women will get a shit load more sympathy than a man every will. So sorry I thought that was suspicious considering it's a 16 year old around alcohol. Not like there can ever be two sides to a story.

I'm not really doing that, as legally these guys clearly raped this girl, end of story. However, there was a thought that came to my mind when I first read the word "rape" in this story, and it was not something that involved fingers. If you have a thread asking why anyone should have sympathy for these people, it at least helps to explain specifically what happened.

None the less, their actions clearly fit the legal definition of rape.

They clearly raped her. End of story. They were convicted. It's not some anti-male conspiracy. And the victim is the one news outlets and people in general should pity. Not two pricks who sexually assaulted a classmate and now (Boo hoo) their dreams of playing football are ruined. Maybe they should have thought of that before they raped a girl.

This is such an icky comment.

That entire area of Ohio should just be nuked off the face of the planet.

@animasta: Studies have shown that the majority of sexual offenders turn into repeat offenders. 5.3% turn into repeat sexual offenders but 87% commit other offenses. Fact is that we like to think the prison system is used to rehabilitate people when in reality they turn into massive recruitment centers for organized crime or at the very least places to learn or hone criminal skills. So no, I don't have to have faith in them because they're teenagers. Statistically speaking of course. And like somebody said dumb teenagers steal, fight, vandalize. They don't rape a girl (finger or otherwise it's still rape) and take photographic and video evidence or the whole rape throughout the night.

@video_game_king: No. But it couldn't hurt at this point. People that do these heinous acts, again statistically speaking, are beyond redemption for any hope of becoming productive members of society. Thus then they become a burden on society. Society shouldn't be forced to carry such burdens.

@rowr: Yeah. Because being drunk, or possibly even roofied, really means that she wanted to be fingered and have photos and videos of it all taken while she was completely unconscious. You're right. It's obviously her fault. How could I be so preposterous.

Jesus fucking Christ. Maybe you, and apparently several other people in this thread, should do some research about something before commenting about it with such stupidity and blatant ignorance. An apologist for a pair of rapists that raped a 16 year old. Congrats. I've now seen rock bottom.

Link for said "statistics". Just a quick Google search, feel free to find anything else on it if you want.

The only way this poor girl was going to get any sympathy from CNN was to parade her around and show her tears, much like Newtown. Boy do they love the waterworks there. Feel sorry for these two pieces of shit if you guys want, I don't but we're all entitled to that individual opinion. This thread was about a news outlet, a major news outlet, sympathizing with a perpetrator instead of the victim. That isn't right. It should be lauded and they should have their asses chewed out by the public, not ignored.