CNN to air “The Hunting Ground” Sunday

This should be interesting: 19 Harvard Law School professors have denounced “The Hunting Ground,” an advocacy show on college sexual assault which CNN plans to air on Sunday, for bias and inaccuracy. “This purported documentary provides a seriously false picture both of the general sexual assault phenomenon at universities and of our student Brandon Winston,” the professors write in an open letter. Legal journalist Stuart Taylor, Jr. calls attention to emails indicating that those working on the documentary might not have embraced what you would call detached or skeptical methods: “We don’t operate the same way as journalists — this is a film project very much in the corner of advocacy for victims, so there would be no insensitive questions or the need to get the perpetrator’s side.” More: Robby Soave and Linda LeFauve, Reason; KC Johnson, Commentary, on Jon Krakauer’s book Missoula.

And: Emily Yoffe, Slate, back in June but not linked previously; and KC Johnson has questions about a UNC episode.

5 Comments

  • It’s nice of CNN to give advance notice, so that Winston can prepare his libel case.

  • Yeah, yeah, propaganda on CNN. What else is new?

  • And then there is this:

    A crew member from “The Hunting Ground,” a one-sided film about campus sexual assault, has been editing Wikipedia articles to make facts conform with the inaccurate representations in the film.

    Source: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/the-hunting-ground-crew-caught-editing-wikipedia-to-make-facts-conform-to-film/article/2576792

  • If they don’t “operate the same as journalists” are they journalists for the purposes of the 1st Amendment and the law of defamation? I would think that declining in advance to get the side of the alleged perpetrators would constitute reckless disregard for the truth.

  • I watched part of it…lots of sobbing testimonials, with no real inquiry into why these young women did not make criminal complaints about alleged violent rape.
    About as convincing as a Mark Lane conspiracy book.