You can’t blame a reporter for reporting uncomfortable facts, like this evidence of a culture that places more responsibility on victims and has more sympathy for rapists. You can blame a reporter, though, for not using the tools available to him to provide a basic balance of information and opinions.
From today’s New York Times:
The police investigation began shortly after Thanksgiving, when an elementary school student alerted a teacher to a lurid cellphone video that included one of her classmates.
The video led the police to an abandoned trailer, more evidence and, eventually, to a roundup over the last month of 18 young men and teenage boys on charges of participating in the gang rape of an 11-year-old girl in the abandoned trailer home, the authorities said.
This story from Cleveland, Texas, is beyond horrifying. Obviously. Unfortunately, further injustices have now been heaped on the victim (and the movement to end rape culture) by the article’s writer and editor.
“Gang Rape of Schoolgirl, and Arrests, Shake Texas Town,” the Times article covering the atrocities, is a collection of one perpetrator-excusing, victim-blaming insult after another. It starts right after the lede and some further information about the suspects, who include middle schoolers and a 27-year-old. Then:
The case has rocked this East Texas community to its core and left many residents in the working-class neighborhood where the attack took place with unanswered questions. Among them is, if the allegations are proved, how could their young men have been drawn into such an act?
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