Serial - the podcast *spoilers*

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.

Part 2 and 3 of jay's interview are pretty damning if accurate, showing up on his doorstep was such a shitty move - fatal flaw of Serial was how poorly she treated Jay. Could have been a whole different show.

I doubt that Koenig/TAL were leaking documents to Reddit or anything like that, as he suspected, but I would not put it past Rabia Chaudry from what I have read on her blog. She really seems to have it in for Jay.

It's amazing how people so concerned with the reasonable doubt standard have already convicted someone else on even less evidence than there was against Syed.

Chaudry admitted that she gave out Jay's last name on twitter and SK asked her to delete it.

but the reddit weirdos didn't need anyone from Serial to leak them anything

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?

I hope I'm not being too presumptuous to say that questions like these display the enormous gulf between the worldview of the average NPR listener and the average african american baltimore teen weed dealer.

I don't think anyone from Serial was leaking stuff to Reddit. Just how she dealt with Jay in contrast to how she dealt with Adnan seems insane.

also man alive otm.

this might be the most succinct criticism of Serial I've read:

It's amazing how people so concerned with the reasonable doubt standard have already convicted someone else on even less evidence than there was against Syed.

i haven't read pt3 of the interview but it sounds like she dealt with Jay the way a journalist should, Jay just chose not to go on the record with her

Yeah, I don't think it makes sense comparing it to Adnan at all. She couldn't really turn up at a prison without an appointment and demand that he talk to her ;)

Also, Serial pretty clearly didn't 'convict' anyone. That is not done by podcasts, but by courts ;)

you really don't know how things work in America

"i haven't read pt3 of the interview but it sounds like she dealt with Jay the way a journalist should, Jay just chose not to go on the record with her"

I think it's safe to say that how she handled it lacked courtesy (she admits as much).

She nurtured a relationship with Adnan, fostered by family friends, and recorded hours of interviews with him.
She showed up at Jay's doorstep unannounced and freaked him, his wife, and child out.
She torpedoed any chance of getting his side of the story from word go.
She dealt with Jay like a journalist ticking off the "ask for comment from Jay" box, not like a journalist legitimately trying to get both sides of the story.

Also it's not just about courtesy or professionalism. It's that SK seemed unable to grasp that she might be dealing with TWO liars, TWO outwardly "normal" people capable of being involved with a horrible act. She needed to make Jay a bad guy - even though Adnan is just as likely a bad (or worse) guy - when she was able to treat Adnan with compassion. That fucked up the whole project.

and i figured that's why adnan got all "you don't know me" when she said that she thought he was a nice guy

i feel like her follow-up email to Jay was professional and gracious, maybe the damage was already done from the surprise visit the day prior though

Probably. That was a gamble, that really didn't pay off. From what Jay says, it seems as if Koenig did try to get to Jays family and friends first. Jay calls that 'harassment'. It's a tough situation, and what she did didn't work. But what this interview also shows, is that she was pretty much spot on when she told Jay that he would have been better served by participating, and telling his side of the story.

Except, she would probably have called him on the weaknesses in his latest story, the same way she did to Adnan.

Jay probably thinks it served him better to talk to a journalist who wasn't so in the bag for Adnan

Well, except, how would he have known back then?

He explains in the interview why he thought she was untrustworthy.

Yup, and it's not as Keyes said.

what do you think I'm saying and why are you attaching a strange timeline to it?

notice that I used the word "thinks" which means I'm talking about right-now Jay, not six months ago Jay

SK was offering do resurrect Serial for him a couple of weeks ago, and he chose to go with a journalist who wasn't phone buddies with Adnan

Oh, ok! I thought you were participating in the debate we were having, on the confrontation five months ago, and you were saying something completely unrelated. Sorry, my mistake!

Didn't the visit to his home only occur after the podcast had begun? It seems like she didn't start out with the mindset that his side of things was an essential part of the story, which I just find baffling. As is repeated ad infinitum, Jay WAS the state's case. Why wouldn't you want to do everything you could to make sure you got an interview with him? Forget about comparisons to Adnan, is that how you'd go about trying to get an interview with ANY key person to a story -- just show up unannounced on their doorstep like "hey wondering if you are lying about this murder," unless you already know them to be hostile, and/or you are Geraldo Rivera?

No, the visit was back in august.

August 8th, to be precise.

Well, regardless, point stands.

she was pretty much spot on when she told Jay that he would have been better served by participating, and telling his side of the story.

― Frederik B, Monday, January 5, 2015 2:35 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Jay probably thinks it served him better to talk to a journalist who wasn't so in the bag for Adnan

― ancient texts, things that can't be pre-dated (President Keyes), Monday, January 5, 2015 2:42 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yes, what I wrote was completely unrelated

x-post: And is it really that unusual? I saw a doc on a newspaper a few months back, and the jounalists did exactly this thing over and over. Especially if they had the idea that the person probably rather wouldn't speak with them. Still shitty, though. Shitty newspaper, also.

Yeah maybe it's not such a bad way to do it actually, sometimes seeing a face creates more trust than a phone call or letter.

tbh though I'm not really sure Jay was best served talking to anyone. I mean it's a tough call -- he's already told inconsistent stories, so anything he says is going to be scrutinized and is inevitably going to contradict something he's said in the past. There's the risk of exposing past perjury, there's the fact that people who suspect him will latch onto anything they can find. I mean honestly I thought he came off as a pretty normal guy, a family man living a quiet life (but not eerily quiet or anything), and I thought that would help him, yet people in the comments are like "SEE, HE'S SO SHADY, I KNEW IT!" And it's more attention and more clicks and more fuel to the fire.

Also, Serial pretty clearly didn't 'convict' anyone. That is not done by podcasts, but by courts ;)

― Frederik B, Monday, January 5, 2015 1:34 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Bingo! And guess what, the courts convicted someone already -- see, you can't have that point both ways. Adnan is not subject to the reasonable doubt standard anymore, he's passed that point already, if you want to talk purely in terms of legal procedure. What I'm talking about is reddit sleuths (not to mention Rabia Chaudry) publicly stating that another particular man is really the murderer, using "convict" idiomatically, if you will.

xposts

It's one tactic, sure. Just seems like an incredibly dumb one to use on the guy given the circumstances, especially as her very first contact with him.
It seems like showing up on the doorstep is something you do as a last resort, after more friendly approaches have not worked.

But yes - sure - if it was the only way to get him to talk, why not? I don't think it was, and the fact that he eventually did go on the record with another journalist supports that to a degree anyway.

But to me, if she's going to level that kind of aggressiveness at Jay - showing up in front of the wife and kid is kind of a "shock and awe" move - she should have gone really hard on Adnan in the last interview. Asked him to respond to the list of "bad luck" that Dana Chivis lays out in the final episode, for example.

Again - it's not that showing up on a doorstep is in itself a terrible move as a journalist - it's just the level of empathy and the willingness to believe Adnan compared to how she treated Jay that just seems way out of sync.

also - for the audience, hearing adnan's voice was really powerful. never hearing present-day Jay made it really easy for him to be the other, the scary one, the liar. Not that nice guy with the cow eyes.

So failing to get Jay on tape was just a huge failure for the show on so many levels.

So it's not something she should have tried to get by showing up unannounced without even trying to call on the phone or email. Just too risky to the project to go all in like that.

I'm not sure it was 'inevitable', that his story would contradict something. He could just have said what he lastly said. And the thing that people jumped on is so weird, the new story that the burial took place after midnight, and that Jay wasn't there. Which, if true, invalidates all the cellphonerecords from that time, which shows the phone in Leakin Park much earlier, and calls being made to Jenn. But that story probably isn't true. And since all the evidence is online know, he could have factchecked what he was going to say. Or, in other words, have checked his memory against the physical evidence.

Also, he kept on talking about how many crimes he has comitted, prob not the smartest thing to do either...

@Brio2: Thing is, if you call or ask, and they say no to an interview, then turning up is even worse. It's mostly something people does first, I think.

I disagree. I think that was SK's calculation too, but I think it was wrong. He ended up talking to another reporter. If she hadn't alienated him from their initial contact, he might have talked to her more...

And I think she could have built his trust if she had been as open to his (bullshit) version of events as she was to Adnan's (bullshit) version of events...

In that brief unrecorded interview she did get, Jay says something like "If it wasn't Adnan, who did it?"

It's a pretty reasonable question - and she never engaged with it at all. That's a pretty huge question to leave hanging - especially given the red herrings she did waste our time on like the Best Buy phone and the collection plate thefts.

So if she spends the whole show running down every lead that might help Adnan, but ignores Jay's one question - why should he talk to her at all?

Well, seeing as the obvious answer to his question is 'Jay', then I don't think he'd have talked to her if she spent more time on his question ;) Also, in that interview with the woman from the innocence project, she speaks about choosing to put forth that weird burglar-dude as a possible subject, because he had died, and there therefore would be no legal problems with blaming him. I don't think the podcast could have really wrestled with the question of who might have done it, without getting in trouble with the law.

But I think we sorta agree on her showing up at his place. At least to some degree. I agree it was a miscalculation. I don't even think Koenig would disagree it was a miscalculation, she seemed sorry for it right away. But I don't think it was a dishonest miscalculation. From what I know - and I could very well be wrong, isn't there someone on here who knows more about this kind of reporting? - it seems not out of the ordinary. It was a gambit, she took it, it was wrong.

or the obvious answer is "nobody. adnan did it"

which is why she didn't want to deal with that question head on.

No, the obvious answer to 'if not Adnan, then who' is not 'Adnan'... That is not how questions work. And I didn't say the obvious answer to that question is the truth of what happened.

what I mean is that when you try to answer the question "if not adnan who?" it becomes clear that he is a really likely suspect. Not enough to convict. But enough to make a radio show about his innocence seem pretty pointless.

And jesus man, try being civil.

Adnan remains by FAR the most likely person to have murdered Hae, and while that is not necessarily enough to convict a person in a court, you really have to twist your mind to think otherwise.

xpost ambush interviews are usually used against insulated powerful people who don't want to answer questions-- ex. the 60 Minutes reporter running after the tobacco executive who's holding a newspaper in front of his face. Or by shitty tabloid and local news shows who want to confront people for the spectacle of it or to catch them with questions they're unprepared for. SK's ambush of Jay felt closer to the last one, though we don't know how hard they tried to contract Jay through other means. They may have felt this was their last resort, but it played as high drama.

yeah it seems like a huge miscalculation on SK's part, the way she ambushed jay - i agree that she might have had a much better chance of getting his side if she'd approached him from a distance, with more honesty.

but i don't think jay's interview served him well at all - he's not compelling, he really seems to play up being the victim, his known history as an exaggerator and liar makes me doubt everything he says, including his version of events involving SK approaching him (2 pretty non-threatening-looking women come to you house and your kids immediately start crying?). if you were already on his side you probably still are, and if you weren't, you definitely haven't switched over.

you know who i really want to see an interview from? stephanie.

yeah - agree he didn't come off well at all

stephanie would def be the best interview