Serial - the podcast *spoilers*

Most of my criticisms are just about sloppiness in storytelling - which have an ethical dimension when you're talking about a murder and a man's life behind bars.

It was bullshit to put a promo at the end of episode one with a quote that was never used in the show, or explained. A woman's voice saying she felt threatened, that she believed in that moment she might end up like Hae. Just so sloppy to leave that hanging. The kind of thing Sarah Koenig would go nuts for if someone else did it... That's a huge thing to throw out there and never name your source or explain if its actually relevant or not.

It was bullshit to never mention that Adnan was married and divorced, and it smells like something she agreed to hold off on mentioning at his request. Or because she thought it was too distracting from what she thought was important. Again - probably no bearing on the case - but just such a clearly biased way of reporting to hold off on that but spend a good chunk of time telling us how well liked he is and the awards he's won, etc. It's just bad reporting to hold off on that.

Her obsession with the Best Buy payphone was bullshit. It's lousy judgement to give more weight in your story to a shoplifter who claims to remember something 15 years ago than the architectural plans of a building.

These are just little details, just off the top of my head. But it's bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. And it's a pattern of telling the story that favours one side of events.

And thinking that Serial is above criticism because the show can be seen as an indictment of an evil system is bullshit.

There would be plenty of better cases to indict the criminal justice system with.

I do feel kind of a renewed curiosity to learn more about inquisitorial (non-adversarial) justice systems since I've always had doubts about the efficacy of an adversarial system.

It's almost insane to expect human beings on a jury to become a robot and disregard things like a defendant choosing not to defend himself on the stand. Like the entirety of Serial is built around shit like "Is that something a guilty/innocent person would do?"

or to become robots

A la the Demolished Man.

i kinda changed my mind abt her when she dropped a "that was the money shot" about a piece of evidence in an early episode

― difficult-difficult lemon-difficult (VegemiteGrrl), Sunday, December 21, 2014 2:23 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol this is why i thought SK was in her early 20s for awhile

Was *In Cold Blood* unethical?

yes

There certainly appear to be reasonable arguments that it's not terribly great journalism... Not sure if that's "unethical" but I think that's a pretty similar argument as what Serial's detractors are making (Serial not half as good as In Cold Blood, but that's kinda an unfair comparison since most things aren't even a quarter as good).

the thing that makes that book unethical is capote's readiness to fill his "characters"' psychic space as though they are entirely his fictive creations. i have made this comparison ad nauseum on ilx, but the ethical version of what capote did would be didion's new journalism which was much more self-conscious about the gap between reporter and subject and the ethics between. or janet malcolm, though i tend to agree with her that journalism can't be ethical in the naive way american mainstream journalists sometimes defend it as being.

sometimes i found serial unethical and sometimes i didn't. i'm not sure it needs to meet the highfalutin', slightly imaginary journalistic standards some have raised (not necessarily in this thread) but i don't think it needed a "rumors" episode, particularly.

xp

the thing it ended up being about is more psychological than legal. i do find that thing interesting, and i find adnan a really compelling subject. i'm not sure sarah koenig even fully understood what made him interesting.

like she mentioned that people observed that adnan's careful weighing of how others must perceive him made him seem guilty--wouldn't an innocent man be screaming his innocence from the rooftops? but i identified with the way adnan was always backtracking and acknowledging the way his words would strike a person who was already convinced of his guilt. i know it's easy for me to speculate, but i think i would be exactly the same way if i were accused of a crime. i have always attributed this tendency in me to an innate over-analytic streak, but hearing it in adnan made me wonder if it was symptomatic of a double-consciousness that comes from belonging to a minority community.

Ftr I do think it was irresponsible to cast aspersions on Jay without damning evidence that suggested he was more involved in the crime than he claimed--SK repeatedly says she won't report on speculation, but throughout the series she tries to get into Jay's head and casts around for what his motives for lying might have been; SK is doing just the same kind of psychic-space-filling Capote was doing.

Outside of that irresponsible speculation, though, I don't know that I'd be ready to call the show unethical--maybe tasteless or poorly considered in its dredging up this case without the skills to come to a stronger conclusion. That I can see.

i couldn't tell if koenig was being deliberately naive about the way she reported some of the stuff i found most interesting. like remember when she duly investigated the possibility of anti-Muslim bias after Shameem explained that that was how she understood her son's conviction? and she recorded that interview with one of the jurors who was like, "yeah, i probably brought anti-Muslim bias to the case, but it magically disappeared once i examined the facts" like are you kidding me with this shit, i guess we should just take you at your word, huh? such a searing indictment of the jury system when racial/religious minorities aren't tried by a jury of their peers but koenig said not a word about it!

SK is doing just the same kind of psychic-space-filling Capote was doing.

no. because she is in the story. capote magically elided himself; turned himself into a godlike narrator. it's part of what makes in cold blood beautiful but it's fucked up.

I'd rather have the unethical version of In Cold Blood than the ethical one

it's about ethics in games podcast journalism

Whoa!

Slim Wilds
38 mins · Edited ·
For the followers of the serial podcast produced by Sarah Koenig: I will make my self available for one interview : 1st, to answer the question of the the people who I hope are concerned with the death of Hae Min Lee (the person who's paid the ultimate price for Entertainment). 2nd, to out this so called reporter for who she truly is.

I can't imagine any circumstance where Jay comes out of this not wanting to defend himself from 12 hours of speculation about his guilt.

i buried a chick in a park AMA

yup, although it might be a no-win for him. Especially since holes have already been poked in his story. But IDK what he can do, he probably now has thousands of people digging through his personal life and past, concocting theories about him, etc. Rabia posted something to her fb page I thought was pretty shitty, an alternate reading of the phone records titled "Here's How Jay Did It" and it was so wildly speculative but she accepted it as though true and so did a lot of her followers, it seemed.

I also listened to Sarah Koenig on Fresh Air, fwiw, and I felt a little less mad at the show, because it seemed like she took her responsibilities so seriously and maybe tripped some wires she hadn't realized she could trip and felt pretty bad about it.

Aren't the "holes" in Jay's story the same ones that were known in 99? I can't imagine a reddit AMA is more terrifying than being key witness in a 1st degree murder trial.

This can't end well.

apparently this offer/threat/promise (?!) has already been removed from his page

2nd, to out this so called reporter for who she truly is.

http://greghowley.com/images/blog_pics/790_v.jpg

The reason I see the holes being a problem is that he may feel a need to explain them, which may put him in the position of admitting or implying he perjured himself.

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/12/29/exclusive-interview-jay-wilds-star-witness-adnan-syed-serial-case-pt-1/

Ugh he's changing his story AGAIN

Cue everyone being outraged that this interview not being conducted by Raymond Burr.

x-post: And his latest story still doesn't match cellphone records...

"story"

"interview"

"outraged"

"Burr"

"Danish"

https://twitter.com/fredthedane

Sorry low blow. Interview seems pretty much what I'd expect from a guy whose sense of that day (beyond the obvious consistencies) was/is a bit inconsistent. Wags will of course point to this all as evidence that "omg he's fabricating again", but to me it just seems like he can't totally make sense of how/when everything happened which doesn't strike me as unusual then and less unusual now 15 years later. Answers make it seem like he's not followed the podcast or the attended redditation of it. Not sure if that speaks to a guy comfortable with the truth or indifferent to the spectacle though.

jay is savvy enough to make an immediate point of keeping his distance from hae's body and avoid getting his DNA on anything, but somehow thinks adnan has the power in this situation?? like, if someone says 'be an accessory to murder or i'll tell the cops about your drugs', why wouldn't you turn around and drive straight to the nearest cop station and tell them what just went down? or agree and then in those gaps when you're not with adnan, call the cops and let them know what's going on so they catch him in the act? and adnan took a huge risk, considering how little he knew jay, in assuming that jay wouldn't go to the cops right away. were there more severe penalties for the kind of drug dealing jay was apparently doing (can anyone else corroborate how big his enterprise was?) than accessory to murder? if so, how did jay know? my automatic assumption would be that getting tied up in a murder is way worse than dealing even a shitload of weed.

yeah i mean how much weed could he possibly have been dealing? still idk it's not completely unbelievable for a dumb teenage kid to poss sweat that aspect. i just think more its also a dumb teenage aspect to not do what a sensible adult would do and like just call the cops

and if my gf's best friend/close friend is saying things to me like 'i'm gonna kill that fucking bitch for thinking she can break up with', i'm pretty sure i'd mention it to her right away, bc that is fucking creepy and weird.

xp but that's my point - he wasn't so dumb that he didn't tread v carefully around hae's body and make sure as much as possible he wasn't leaving dna lying around.

i actually think this is p convincing in a way idk tho im not triangulating it against the podcast cuz i think i forgot most of it already

idk like it kindof fits in my mind now (or it fits an afterschool special plot i can picture) - adnan type a "really driven" maybe would flip out & do this & be able to be so sociopathic abt it for 15 yrs. the scene of adnan hi @ cathys party asking 'how do you stop being high?" jibes w him as not smoking much and/or acting more strangely when high and makes that "scene" seem right to me fwiw

interview seems pretty much what I'd expect from a guy whose sense of that day (beyond the obvious consistencies) was/is a bit inconsistent. Wags will of course point to this all as evidence that "omg he's fabricating again", but to me it just seems like he can't totally make sense of how/when everything happened which doesn't strike me as unusual then and less unusual now 15 years later.

i think this is m/l otm. & the degree to which this story fits or at least could fit, to insert that instead a serial killer did it def seems more fantastical than anything to me. id prob think it more marginally probable that jay did it

Those of you who think Jay could have just turned around and threatened to turn Adnan in are forgetting that 1) this is all in the heat of a pretty scary moment and 2) it was probably at least in the back of his mind that he'd be the black weed dealer going against the star student/upstanding citizen. It's also possible that he just didn't have a powerful enough impulse not to help - teenager with limited judgment and moral capacity etc. The interview doesn't make much of anything more or less likely to me. Just like adnan, he's had a long time to turn things over in his mind and that can change the story even of someone who is innocent. I certainly did not get any particular sense of a psycho or pathological liar but who knows.

it was probably at least in the back of his mind that he'd be the black weed dealer going against the star student/upstanding citizen.

^^ i mean establishing this point seems to be the whole purpose of part 1 of the interview, no?

yeah, he made a persausive case that for someone of his background/situation, calling the cops was not really a first option.

http://www.vox.com/2014/12/31/7472965/jays-interview-adnan-serial
http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/evidenceprof/2014/12/ive-posted-25-entriessarah-koenigsserial-podcast-which-deals-withthe-1999-prosecution-of-17-year-old-adnan-syed-for-murderin.html#more

People discussing how Jay's interview has pretty much destroyed the prosecution's case.

I'm pretty much uninterested in getting a murderer sprung because a witness tells a slightly different story 15 years later.

Is that actually going to happen? It's not like Jay recanted a la Thin Blue Line.