“Well his friends and family don’t think he did it and the victims were poor black whores and you can’t be believing them.”

Sure, but the—or, well, a—problem with this story is that it doesn’t raise any actual factual dispute that might challenge Holtzclaw’s conviction. It just treats the conviction as one among a competing set of essentially equal narratives, as if it’s just, like, the court’s opinion, man, and everybody’s entitled to…

I wonder if it’s incomprehensible on purpose. That swollen writing hides the gist of it, which is “I like this guy because I covered his football career. I don’t like it when people whose asses I kissed are revealed to be monsters.” Plus he’s probably trying to be poignant.

If you want to write a story about how a convicted criminal is actually innocent, you need to provide actual evidence to support it. And you need to actually explain the evidence that led to the conviction. This piece basically said “Well his friends and family don’t think he did it and the victims were poor black…

I actually think this was the author’s attempt to soften the original sentence, maybe at the suggestion of an editor? But holy hell does it miss the point. There are two ideas in it, one of them monstrous: 1) it’s tragic that people apparently only believe his victims deserve to recover and 2) he hopelessly and…

For background: I formally took the ACT twice (over a decade ago, so time may have taken its toll) and both times got a perfect on the reading section. This is only relevant to prove that under time constraints, my reading comprehension is significantly above the mean of college bound Americans.

This guy covered Holtzdick his entire college career. Shocking. Unbearably tone deaf on top of it all. “Hey, by the way, they lived in one of those places you see on television where blacks do bad stuffs, and they all did drugs! Drugs I say!” -every time he mentioned the rape victims (not that he referred to them that…

This is absolutely disgusting and it is truly unbelievable that a site that writes something like the Mel Hall piece can hit publish on this.