Jake

Idle Thumbs 189: Serious Ma'am

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Serious Sam 1 (first encouter + second encounter) is great. The huge open areas, shit load of enemies, whacky traps and game mechanics. It's just great. The meteor shower in the second encounter is one of my all time favorite game segments. Serious Sam 2 sucked big time. Hardly any huge open areas, mostly small areas and corridors. Dumb boss fights. Serious Sam 3 started of bad, but once you've managed to drag yourself through the "modern FPS" kind of gameplay it becomes more like SS1, but it still does not measure up to the originals.

Note, that there are two versions of First Encounter and Second Encounter. The "HD" versions use the Serious Sam 3 engine iirc, they are mostly the same, except for quite some of the whacky traps of the original. The SS3 engine did not have the gravity tricks the SS1 engine has. But also some things don't look as impressive as in the original, for example the meteor shower looks much better in the original.

This part of example is much different in the HD version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=H7DxwHz5fFc#t=991

You can get the original encounters in the "Serious Sam Classics: Revolution" pack (currently for less that $2). Revolution is a fan made 3rd encounter in the original engine (sponsored by Croteam).

My preferred way to play Serious Sam is to play in coop, and crank up the difficulty to the highest and optionally increase lives.

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I played through Second Encounter recently and didn't enjoy it nearly as much as First Encounter. The weapon progression was strange, it felt as if the game was reluctant to give me the fun and useful weapons, at times the level design got convoluted in a way that slowed down the momentum of the game and there was a lot of encounter design (coupled with the weapon progression) that I didn't care much for. First Encounter was more straight forward and better for it I think. Things like the bouncing room might be funny the first 10 seconds, but it's annoying to play. I'll take 1000 Kleers rushing at me thanks.

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Very serious "Serial" discussion.  But forgive me, due to the non-linear editing of the episode, I spend the entire time assuming that this was the opening bit.  I for one, would buy at least one box of Idle Thumbs cereal.  I feel we have not yet had a good video game cereal.  What will be the Citizen Kane of video game cereals? 

MJD

 

 

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For me the best touch in Serious Sam is that he's roughly the same speed as Doomguy but you hear every individual footstep so the entire game just has this manic sprinting in the background.

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Revolution is a fan made 3rd encounter in the original engine (sponsored by Croteam).

 

That's another really cool thing about Croteam, they've had several games about Serious Sam made by fans or other indie devs.  3rd Encounter, Double D and Random Encounter for sure, seems like there migh tbe one more. 

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Wah!  That's ... dammit.  Well, I drew it too fast to realize that.  I was too caught up in the fact that Chrispy-Remo-Os were not Os... not even seeing that wasn't quite the fundamental problem.

 

I'm sure experienced cereal makers deal with this problem all the time...

 

MJD

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I haven't played The Talos Principle so this might be off base but from the videos I've seen and you talking about it, I think you might enjoy Kairo. EDIT: It's currently 80% off on Steam.

 

I want to emphatically second this.  Kairo is great for many of the same reasons that Chris praises The Talos Principle.  It is a very quiet, elegant, and restrained first-person puzzle game.  It has no HUD, no inventory, not even a "use" key.  All interaction with the environment is effected by moving around in the environment.

 

The design reminds me of Iikka Keränen's Blue IKSPQ maps for Quake 1, and the game lets you WASD around quickly and fluidly, more like playing Quake than a typical adventure/puzzle game.  Kairo is striking in how well it is able to create distinct and memorable locations out of very simple, elegant building blocks. The atmosphere and design made me feel like I was in an Arthur C. Clarke novel exploring weird alien ruins.

 

The puzzles are engaging, but not difficult.  Which, for me, made the pacing feel just right.  It's not at all like a Myst game where you frequently spend lots of time stuck in one place trying to figure out what to do.  Most of the time I figured out what to do before a location wore out its welcome and was on to seeing something new.

 

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  My co-workers are all obsessed with that digustingly-named radio program, but that Awl article is not encouraging.

Disgustingly named? What?

 

It seems like a big mistake to make statements like "not her story to tell," or "this is bad because of the way we report about minorities, traditionally in the media."  Those don't seem like useful critiques.

This is very much how I feel. Considering This American Life is a large platform for telling the stories of lives of which most people would not hear, no matter how lacking in diversity the reporters are (often sheltered and white with speech impediments, I know), I still find it incredibly important that they make the effort. In the earlier days of Serial, before anyone started criticizing race, I personally felt kind of glad that this as I started to realized it was reporting on a situation in a more diverse area of Baltimore plus the Muslim aspect (a world I know nothing about). It makes it that much more comprehensive than hearing another story about white collar crime or some kind of suburban dispute.

 

Would anyone even bother with Adnan if it weren't for Sarah Koenig? Rabia did come to her, so to criticize Koenig's background for a story she told after being prompted doesn't seem to work because the platform is open for anyone to make a podcast.

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I didn't notice it the first time around, but it bothers me a little to have criticisms of race and privilege surrounding Serial be dismissed as "not useful." Even if the criticism of "this perpetuates a long history of white reporting on communities of color and that makes me uncomfortable" doesn't particularly strike you as useful, I don't think it follows that it shouldn't be made. Criticism isn't under any obligation to fix the object of criticism, it just points out the strengths and weaknesses of it, both on its own and in context.

I just have trouble seeing any difference between disregarding criticisms of Serial's racial politics specifically because they don't offer a roadmap for overcoming a largely systemic problem beyond saying "try to be more careful next time and do less of that," and, say, Anita Sarkeesian's criticisms of women in video games, which mostly have similar apparent failings.

I think it's great that Adnan's story is being reported by any means, although I personally know at least two people of color who feel differently. Still, they and I both agree that Serial is far from the best possible way it could have been reported, which I feel is hard to argue against. Maybe people are more frustrated that Serial is being criticized for things that are really shortcomings of our entire society, but I prefer to think that Serial reveals those shortcomings in a small-scale, innocuous, and comprehensible form, the better to be called out. Serial has made me think more about white reporting on communities of color than anything before, and I personally find that useful.

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I really wish there were more specific illustrations of what specifically Serial's problems with race are. I don't think it is in any way flawless, but as far as I can tell, at least in this thread, the people taking this tack seem to be taking it as a given that everyone understands what these problems are, instead of clearly and straightforwardly describing the specific problems.

Serial is headed up by an experienced woman journalist, employing several other women, and focusing on an arguable miscarriage of justice against a person of color. (Again, I think there are many journalistic questions raised, but they would be equally applicable regardless of the ethnicity of the subjects, in my opinion.) Is this not a fairly laudible usage of journalism? In a world where Nancy Grace and the rest of her ilk exists, is Serial really the representative case of exploitative true crime coverage? That obviously does not in and of itself excuse any missteps when it comes to representations of race, but if the main criticism is simply that it's a white person reporting on a person of color then I'm not really convinced. I found Sarah's assumptions about the effects of racism on the trial to be pretty dubious but, as noted, she did then follow up with a great deal of reporting intended to highlight how racism probably DID in fact come into play. What are the other SPECIFIC objections people have with her treatment of the story? Maybe I'm somehow deluding myself or being willfully blind but I'm seriously having a hard time finding concrete arguments to respond to.

When this exact kind of story happens and the subject is a white person, the common progressive response is "We're hearing about this because it was yet another white victim, and if it weren't the story would go unreported." (And that's a pretty fair observation because it often is the case.) Now this case is bringing an arguable injustice against a non-white person to light, and to me it has been done in an incredibly fastidiously reported way.

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Chris made a comment about playing Talos with Sarah which Jake followed up on by saying that playing adventure games with another person was a great experience.  I've actually been doing this for the last couple of days, with a game that Jake worked on no less.  I've been playing the Strong Bad games with Tegan via Steam's new streaming feature.  While it's not optimal (the lag has occasionally led to her suggesting something after I've done it), it's about as close to the couch experience as I've come thanks to the almost zero amount of effort it takes.  Using something like Twitch to play a game with a specific person feels very cumbersome but with Steam's service it feels totally right.

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I had a friend who I used to play adventures with until we grew apart, it was really weird in some ways. It was fun to play games only I was playing (or my dad) with someone else, but he wasn't very good at them so I was basically just telling him what to do since I played them ahead myself. Playing Space Quest together was awesome though. Experiencing all of those death scenes over and over as a couple of 11 year olds is just plain stupid fun.

 

I also remember maybe a slightly earlier than that I was in line for these bumper boat things at Mountasia and I overheard a couple of boys talking about Day of the Tentacle. I was ecstatic because someone else knew of a game I played. They hadn't beaten it yet and were having a hard time. I proceeded to tell them pretty much every solution they were asking for all the way to the end of the line. In retrospect I feel like a huge nerd because I know I had another friend with me and I just kind of ignored him for a bit to geek out on this game he had never played with these strangers like a doofus mouthbreather.

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That's a really excellent comment, and you're right that there has been a lot of vagueness as to what, exactly, is wrong with Serial. I don't think there's been a single piece that really nails a bunch of them at once.  What I've seen is piecemeal scattered around.  Below are all ones I've seen.  I think the first 3 are in many ways the most important.  Now, to be fair, I think these kinds of issues are present in lots and lots of journalism and aren't unique to Serial. But given its rockstar status in journalism and podcasting right now, examining where it falls down is useful.

This ended up fairly long, but in order to lay out the problems (particularly the first three), it takes some time to explain them.

1. The most discussed element is Koenig's dismissal of racism. The defense is that she then goes on to present evidence that there could have been a racism element. But the biggest problem here is that she couldn't see it. She's blind to it, and thus what else is she missing? I've seen an argument that because she's dismissive of the role that racism played, she failed to investigate the greater context of what was happing in and around Baltimore at that time, including some high profile controversies regarding racism and local police departments. In the late 90s, the Baltimore City PD was roiled by a bunch of claims of minority cops being harassed by their peers, disciplined differently, not promoted and fired without cause. Worth pointing out is that the County PD investigated Adnan, but as Ferguson showed, problems with police forces in a metro area tend to cross all the jurisdictions. And the County PD is in it's 3rd federal investigation regarding racism in its hiring and employment in the last 40 years. Allegations involved in these cases include black police and firefighters finding nooses and pieces of shit wrapped in black newspapers left in their workplace, by their fucking peers. This is the climate that minority cops worked in around Baltimore. What was it like on the streets? In the late 90s, half of the young black men and boys in Baltimore were in the criminal justice system (jail, prison, probation, parole or awaiting trial). FUCKING HALF! Can you imagine that, if half of your peers were currently in the criminal justice system. Obviously Adnan was not black, but he was a minority in a city that was crushing minority populations under its heel. There were so many criminal cases in 1999, prosecutors offices were having to release some people because they could not try them in a timely manner.



I really wish there were more specific illustrations of what specifically Serial's problems with race are. I don't think it is in any way flawless, but as far as I can tell, at least in this thread, the people taking this tack seem to be taking it as a given that everyone understands what these problems are, instead of clearly and straightforwardly describing the specific problems.

Koenig doesn't talk about Baltimore. But Baltimore matters.

Just a few days before the murder, Baltimore's head prosecutor had to publicly apologize after two men accused of murder were released when the city accidentally failed to try their cases. In this apology she described her office as "totally overwhelmed," asked for a budget increase of $8 million—over 50%—or else she wouldn't be able to do her job properly, and was rejected by the Mayor.

This happens again, by the way. It happens a few times—serious violent criminals getting let out because the prosecutor's office was too overwhelmed to process cases in a reasonable time. People are all over the Baltimore Sun calling the office incompetent, expressing disgust.

 
There's an entire world of context around Adnan's trial. That context often includes racial elements. But Koenig doesn't bring up any of that context.

2. And dovetaling directly from that context, we have my biggest problem. This is one that I haven't seen anyone else really bring up, but it's beeing a glaring problem for me since about halfway through. There are four characters who are almost ever present in the story, but are not given the same treatment as everyone else. The prosecutor, the judge, and the lead detectives. Koenig has an entire episode about the streaker who found the body. She has an episode about rumors, and whether Adnan was taking cash from his Mosque's collection box. We know all about Jay working at a porn shop and various odd factoids about his life. There's countless time spent vacillating around what a single phone call means, and whether a payphone existed. But there is almost no examination of the four people who are most responsible for prosecuting and convicting Adnan. Why does Koenig dissect the lives of so many people of color, but she leaves the authorities' histories completely untouched. Was the prosecutor's office that handled this one of the ones that was understaffed and overwhelmed? Did the two officers who investigated this have a history of any disciplinary problems or public complaints against them? What was the judge's docket like at this time? On one hand, these aren't necessarily questions about race. They're good journalism questions. But when you factor in the context of how fucked the Baltimore criminal justice system was in the late 90s, not giving the public employees the same treatment that everyone else got stands out to me as being really weird. And perhaps weird because she didn't see why she should investigate a white cop with the same zeal that she would investigate a black kid who did drugs.

3. Something else Koenig never brings up is Adnan's sentence. It's difficult to talk about sentencing in this country without talking about race relations. Minorities get sentenced far harsher than whites. 73 percent of minors who received life sentences were people of color. Black kids are, per capita, given life sentences 10 times as much as white kids. Again, Koenig's dismisal of racism seems to have blinded her to talking about other racial elements that could have been part of this story.

4. Issues with whether or not she understands and accurately communicates the cultures and daily realities of the people in her story. The Awl piece (which I don't think is actually that good, but has a few good points in it) addresses some of those. Most notable in the Awl piece are not the author's conclusions, but Rabia Chaudry's statements that Koenig really wasn't understanding the nuances of either culture, particularly that she conflated the particulars of each kid's family with being about the greater immigrant culture (which is a very unnuanced way to present that information).

5. Are there microagressions present that would be invisible to white folk, but present to people of color? Again, the Awl piece talks about this. This isn't something I'm really qualified to talk about, but I've seen it mentioned in a few places.

6. How do Blacks, Koreans, Pakistanis, etc., feel about the presentation of Serial? It's great that white people love it so much, but if it makes people of color uncomfortable, there's probably something there worth exploring. This is one of the better pieces examing that, about how invisible Hae ultimately ends up being. Also whether or not the language Koenig uses to talk about her ends up fitting into expected Asian stereotypes. There's also this piece, about the frustration a guy has with all his white friends loving Serial so much.

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An addendum to what all I just wrote.
 
In regards to #3, and how little time the judge, prosecutor and detectives are given, take a look at the "People Map" on the Serial website.  In their extra material, they don't even think to mention the judge or prosecutor, and the two detectives get the smallest entry.  The government employees who prosecuted and oversaw Adnan's conviction are practically afterthoughts in Serial compared to the other personalities presented. 
 
Also, in defense of Serial, this piece is worth reading.  I think the author is needlessly condescending and shitty in a number of places, but she does a good job of illustrating how hard Koenig tried to portray the major figures as being complex and human, not stereotyped.

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Some of these criticisms are, to my mind, very valid critiques of the full extent of Sarah Koenig's reporting (although I think it's pretty clear that actually reporting the true entirety of this case would be basically impossible, and it also seems clear from her reporting that police records of the case were woefully inadequate), but framing them in aggregate as boiling down to a white woman reporting on a minority is a really gross oversimplification and I would wager mainly inaccurate. Yes, there are absolutely huge sentencing disparities by race, for instance. But is every single conceivable piece of connective tissue between all elements of race and justice in America automatically within the purview of this one show? I mean, maybe it is, I don't know. But I don't think every one of these things is automatic or a given. Serial primarily concerned itself with the specifics of why this case was unusual, which had to do with the relatively paper-thin case brought against the defendant, and the seeming impossibility to actually corroborate even that relatively light case with extensive reporting. It's also a show about people, a reminder that all of the figures we see represented as sound bytes and caricatures in crime reporting are complex individuals with wildly differing perspectives, memories, and experiences. This seems like a worthwhile goal to me, even if there are ALSO other worthwhile goals for a piece of longform crime reporting. The show does not aim to be a comprehensive examination of race in the American criminal justice system. That would be a laudable project, it's just one that probably has a fundamentally different identity and style from the very start.

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Some of these criticisms are, to my mind, very valid critiques of the full extent of Sarah Koenig's reporting (although I think it's pretty clear that actually reporting the true entirety of this case would be basically impossible, and it also seems clear from her reporting that police records of the case were woefully inadequate), but framing them in aggregate as boiling down to a white woman reporting on a minority is a really gross oversimplification and I would wager mainly inaccurate. Yes, there are absolutely huge sentencing disparities by race, for instance. But is every single conceivable piece of connective tissue between all elements of race and justice in America automatically within the purview of this one show? I mean, maybe it is, I don't know. But I don't think every one of these things is automatic or a given. Serial primarily concerned itself with the specifics of why this case was unusual, which had to do with the relatively paper-thin case brought against the defendant, and the seeming impossibility to actually corroborate even that relatively light case with extensive reporting. It's also a show about people, a reminder that all of the figures we see represented as sound bytes and caricatures in crime reporting are complex individuals with wildly differing perspectives, memories, and experiences. This seems like a worthwhile goal to me, even if there are ALSO other worthwhile goals for a piece of longform crime reporting. The show does not aim to be a comprehensive examination of race in the American criminal justice system. That would be a laudable project, it's just one that probably has a fundamentally different identity and style from the very start.

Just to clarify, Chris, do you not see the points brought up by Bjorn (#1 and #4 especially, although I hadn't thought of #2 and it's a really good point) as systemic issues in crime reporting, or do you see them as systemic but outside of Serial's potential scope? If the latter, what specific form could crime reporting take that you would find appropriate to address these issues? I personally would think that a podcast that is, as you say, about discovering the real people behind the caricatures of crime reporting could also be the right venue for addressing or even just touching upon the flattening effects of race on those same people, but you seem to disagree, so I'm curious for your thoughts.

Also, somehow this thread has gotten pinned, presumably to serve as a warning to other, better threads.

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Some of these criticisms are, to my mind, very valid critiques of the full extent of Sarah Koenig's reporting (although I think it's pretty clear that actually reporting the true entirety of this case would be basically impossible, and it also seems clear from her reporting that police records of the case were woefully inadequate), but framing them in aggregate as boiling down to a white woman reporting on a minority is a really gross oversimplification and I would wager mainly inaccurate.

 

In writing up that summary, I've actually come around to agreeing with you on this (particularly the bolded part). Many of the criticisms of Serial are not nuanced and well thought out, they feel like kneejerk reactions.  They actually make it somewhat harder to have an in-depth discussion about what is wrong with Serial, because there is so much focus on a handful of inflammatory criticisms of it (I don't like the Awl piece, although it has a few decent points in it). 

 

But is every single conceivable piece of connective tissue between all elements of race and justice in America automatically within the purview of this one show?

 

No, but the point I was trying to make is that Baltimore in the late 90s is an exceptional place, it sits outside of the norm statistically more than any other metro in per capita numbers of young people of color it was prosecuting (other metros varied between 20-40 percent, but Baltimore's 50 percent of black youth was just insane). If Adnan's story took place somewhere else, I could agree that the greater discussion on prosecution and sentencing of non-whites doesn't need to be in it. But I think it's much harder to make that argument when the city is Baltimore in the late 90s. It would be like writing about Ferguson, and not including any information about the two decade shift in funding municipal governments heavily with punitive fines aimed at poor, minority communities, which accelerated following the housing crash. Yes, you could write a story that was completely factually accurate without that information, but you would have missed the truth about Ferguson. The rage would be unexplained, because you lack context. I think if you're going to write about any criminal trial of a minority in Baltimore in this era, you have to address the context of what was happening in the criminal justice system there. 

Also worth pointing out about Serial is that it never had a definitive length. If Koenig was producing a 1 hour documentary, I'm much more sympathetic about needing to cut and trim. But Serial, as far as they ever communicated, was going to take as many episodes as necessary to explore the subject. An episode exploring the issues with the police, prosecutors' offices and criminal justice system could have been fit in. There are plenty of people who could have been interviewed about that time who could have provided plenty of info about it. It would have been more work, but it wouldn't necessarily been many weeks more work. 

 

Honestly, I think Koenig would have preferred to not talk about race at all.  But she had so many people saying, "Um, hey, there's totally a racial element here," that she ultimately felt she had to include something.  But it wasn't an angle she had any interest in pursuing herself. 

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2. And dovetaling directly from that context, we have my biggest problem. This is one that I haven't seen anyone else really bring up, but it's beeing a glaring problem for me since about halfway through. There are four characters who are almost ever present in the story, but are not given the same treatment as everyone else. The prosecutor, the judge, and the lead detectives. Koenig has an entire episode about the streaker who found the body. She has an episode about rumors, and whether Adnan was taking cash from his Mosque's collection box. We know all about Jay working at a porn shop and various odd factoids about his life. There's countless time spent vacillating around what a single phone call means, and whether a payphone existed. But there is almost no examination of the four people who are most responsible for prosecuting and convicting Adnan. Why does Koenig dissect the lives of so many people of color, but she leaves the authorities' histories completely untouched. Was the prosecutor's office that handled this one of the ones that was understaffed and overwhelmed? Did the two officers who investigated this have a history of any disciplinary problems or public complaints against them? What was the judge's docket like at this time? On one hand, these aren't necessarily questions about race. They're good journalism questions. But when you factor in the context of how fucked the Baltimore criminal justice system was in the late 90s, not giving the public employees the same treatment that everyone else got stands out to me as being really weird. And perhaps weird because she didn't see why she should investigate a white cop with the same zeal that she would investigate a black kid who did drugs.

 

I got the impression that she avoided deep dives on them because they were authority figures and still alive. She mentions that the detectives involved essentially pushed away from being interviewed or giving comment and it seems like she didn't want to press that issue with them let alone the higher ups in the legal system. She may have considered reporting on them to some extent and ultimately declined to do it or maybe she dropped the angle immediately focusing on the case rather than the people.

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Just to clarify, Chris, do you not see the points brought up by Bjorn (#1 and #4 especially, although I hadn't thought of #2 and it's a really good point) as systemic issues in crime reporting, or do you see them as systemic but outside of Serial's potential scope? If the latter, what specific form could crime reporting take that you would find appropriate to address these issues? I personally would think that a podcast that is, as you say, about discovering the real people behind the caricatures of crime reporting could also be the right venue for addressing or even just touching upon the flattening effects of race on those same people, but you seem to disagree, so I'm curious for your thoughts.

No, I already indicated I found the first point somewhat bizarre and concerning, although, again, I think the degree to which Sarah interrogated her own assumptions to be admirable. She cast herself as the skeptic but then immediately spent a whole episode weakening that skepticism.

I do disagree with #4. I just don't buy the claims. I don't think it is possible for anyone of any race or culture to be able to fully inhabit someone else's experience, even if the person comes from a very similar background, and I find the claims that she did a great disservice in this department to be unpersuasive. I don't for a second claim that that this is not an issue that exists in a serious way in our culture, I just think Serial is a pretty weak example of it.

Also as for #2, I simply am not willing to default to questioning Sarah's motives to the point that I will assume this is a racial motivation, conscious or unconscious. If you want to criticize the lack of her interrogation of the prosecutorial side of things, again, I would hope that one would be equally bothered by that regardless. But I imagine the most likely reason the reporting slanted this way is because she talked to the people who were actually available, and about whom there were relevant materials on record—and also because she was not trying to reprosecute the case, but rather to try and fill holes that were left gaping. She was trying to uncover NEW (or recontextualized) information from people who may have had specific preexisting knowledge about the people and circumstances in question because of their actual proximity to the events and to the personalities prior to the events, and that is a lot closer to the normal human beings surrounding Adnan's life as opposed to the prosecutor and detectives whose case was already made and successfully won in court. Their perspective was the one that was already shared with the world; this podcast aimed to find other perspectives to paint a fuller picture of that case. Also, I guarantee that if the prosecutors and detectives agreed to be interviewed, she would have interviewed them. She did not do deep dive investigations into people's lives, with the exception of Adnan (whose family obviously supported this anyway), she did interviews. The deep investigations about people's lives generally came from materials that were already exposed (ie, Hae's diary, or all the testimony and context surrounding Jay). But most of her material came from direct one on one interviews.

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I got the impression that she avoided deep dives on them because they were authority figures and still alive. She mentions that the detectives involved essentially pushed away from being interviewed or giving comment and it seems like she didn't want to press that issue with them let alone the higher ups in the legal system. She may have considered reporting on them to some extent and ultimately declined to do it or maybe she dropped the angle immediately focusing on the case rather than the people.

 

I think you're right, but I don't accept that as explanation, if that makes sense. She dove pretty deep on the personal lives of a bunch of people that weren't authority figures, who pushed back against her and who are still alive. That she did none of that with the authority figures stands out to me quite a bit. I listened to every episode, a few of them twice, and I would have been hard pressed to have named the prosecutor, judge or the detectives. But I know the names of everyone else by heart.

On a completely different angle, I do want to say how impressed I am by the amount of work Koenig put in. I've mostly written about criticisms of Serial (because I think they're pretty interesting to talk about), but I don't want to diminish the magnitude of what Koenig and company did either. I doubt many people realize how grueling and exhausting this work can be over an extended amount of time, nor the unique stress and pressure involved. I covered one murder trial in-depth (multiple months and stories on the same case) when I was working as a reporter. Calling the mother of a dead girl is the single worst thing professionally I've ever had to do.  I'm not sure I've ever been racked by guilt or self-doubt as much as I was on that piece. 

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I really wish there were more specific illustrations of what specifically Serial's problems with race are. I don't think it is in any way flawless, but as far as I can tell, at least in this thread, the people taking this tack seem to be taking it as a given that everyone understands what these problems are, instead of clearly and straightforwardly describing the specific problems.

Serial is headed up by an experienced woman journalist, employing several other women, and focusing on an arguable miscarriage of justice against a person of color. (Again, I think there are many journalistic questions raised, but they would be equally applicable regardless of the ethnicity of the subjects, in my opinion.) Is this not a fairly laudible usage of journalism? In a world where Nancy Grace and the rest of her ilk exists, is Serial really the representative case of exploitative true crime coverage? That obviously does not in and of itself excuse any missteps when it comes to representations of race, but if the main criticism is simply that it's a white person reporting on a person of color then I'm not really convinced. I found Sarah's assumptions about the effects of racism on the trial to be pretty dubious but, as noted, she did then follow up with a great deal of reporting intended to highlight how racism probably DID in fact come into play. What are the other SPECIFIC objections people have with her treatment of the story? Maybe I'm somehow deluding myself or being willfully blind but I'm seriously having a hard time finding concrete arguments to respond to.

When this exact kind of story happens and the subject is a white person, the common progressive response is "We're hearing about this because it was yet another white victim, and if it weren't the story would go unreported." (And that's a pretty fair observation because it often is the case.) Now this case is bringing an arguable injustice against a non-white person to light, and to me it has been done in an incredibly fastidiously reported way.

I think what I found a bit annoying about that section was how Koenig basically dismissed the notion of racism having any bearing on the outcome, and then proceeded to list several occasions where problematic attitudes towards Adnan's culture and religion manifested themselves in the trial, including the opinions of some of the jury members. It just felt a little weird her initial statement that racism didn't influence the events in the court, and then gave several examples where it seemed quite plausible that it could have, there was a bit of a disconnect between her attitude and the evidence she brought up. 

 

Anyway, apart from that slightly bizarre example I agree with you insofar as I didn't find anything particularly objectionable about the whole thing in terms of race, I think that there were flaws in the presentation of the case, and the absence of any comment from Hae's family or the larger Korean in Baltimore, while completely understandable, makes it a rather one-sided affair.

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I think what I found a bit annoying about that section was how Koenig basically dismissed the notion of racism having any bearing on the outcome, and then proceeded to list several occasions where problematic attitudes towards Adnan's culture and religion manifested themselves in the trial, including the opinions of some of the jury members. It just felt a little weird her initial statement that racism didn't influence the events in the court, and then gave several examples where it seemed quite plausible that it could have, there was a bit of a disconnect between her attitude and the evidence she brought up. 

 

Anyway, apart from that slightly bizarre example I agree with you insofar as I didn't find anything particularly objectionable about the whole thing in terms of race, I think that there were flaws in the presentation of the case, and the absence of any comment from Hae's family or the larger Korean in Baltimore, while completely understandable, makes it a rather one-sided affair.

 

I read that a little differently. I haven't gone back and re-listened in the context of this discussion yet, but my memory of this scene played out something like: she's talking to Adnan's mother, and retains a "hmmmm" moment from the interview, at which point she interjects with "hear that? That was me being skeptical." Which is to say, I recall her using her initial skepticism as a jump-off point to reveal stuff she then found that undermines it. She never comes around to concluding that this was, as Sean put it, a To Kill a Mockingbird style racial conviction, but it seemed to me like her eyebrow was certainly raised a few times during that episode.

 

I'm going to go re-listen to that episode now to find out if I'm full of shit or not.

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