This is CNN

[jwplayer config=”pjmedia_eddriscoll” mediaid=”61301″ width=”590″ height=”360″]

“ALL KINDS OF WRONG: CNN Pays Touching Tribute To The Rapists Who Attacked A 16-Year-Old Girl,” the Website Upworthy.com notes:

CNN took an interesting angle on the Stuebenville rape verdict. They focused on the convicted rapists, and their lost potential. They may have to do a WHOLE YEAR in prison, just because they and some of their buddies drugged and repeatedly raped a 16-year-old girl, then dumped her in a yard and urinated on her. (Had they been tried as adults, they would have gotten 5-12 years, which also isn’t nearly enough, but I digress.)

You’ll notice how little they actually mention the victim. Sigh.

More on the above CNN segment from the Daily Caller:

In a subsequent interview with senior legal correspondent Paul Callan, Crowley repeatedly invoked Mays and Richmond’s ages and asked Callan to comment on the emotional toll that the verdict would take on the rapists and their families.

After repeatedly airing the boys’ apologies, as well statements from their families, CNN also covered the testimony by the victim’s mother. In another CNN segment on the trial, news anchor Fredericka Whitfield noted that “family members tried their hardest to plead for some forgiveness from the victim’s family, as well as from the judge.”

The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple criticized CNN for implying that the boys did not deserve their fate. He took Callan to task for noting that they would now be labeled sex offenders.

“‘Label,’ huh?,” wrote Wemple. “These two young men are ‘labeled’ sex offenders because they are sex offenders. To choose the term ‘label’ suggests that perhaps the two don’t deserve such categorization, that the fate that has befallen them is somehow undeserved.”

Hey, over the years, CNN’s upended morality has caused the network to shill for Saddam and Kim-Jong Il and praise Castro; if you’re surprised that a story such as this can be impacted by the network’s moral equivalence, you haven’t been paying attention to the network’s excesses.

As Lee Stranhan writes at Big Journalism, yesterday’s verdict and its media aftermath is the culmination of six months of wild coverage of the story from the MSM:

The actual story, disturbing enough on its own was far less salacious than the Anonymous embellishments. Why did a  sexual assault that involved three drunken sixteen-year old in a small Ohio town became major news? The narrative that the media pushed is a mixture of an easy to explain premise: Friday Night Lights with rapists meets cultural Marxism, taking cues from academic radical feminism and just good old Red blooded hatred of the United States. Steubenville became a way to belittle middle-American values like ‘football culture’ and to promote the idea that America, distinct from the rest of the world,  foments ‘rape culture.’

Like the initial reporting on the Occupy Wall Street movement, the media covering Steubenville romanticized anti-American anarchists and gave an offshoot of the Anonymous movement called #KnightSec credence, interviews and airtime. The biased and sensationalist press went with the most lurid and liberal-agenda driven narrative imaginable, despite there being no factual basis for many of the often repeated claims in the story.

The Steubenville travesty has not been an obscure story. In fact, in late December and early January the story made headlines internationally and the trial this week is being covered by heavy hitters like CNN, the Associated Press, The Los Angeles Times and was featured on ESPN and 20/20 this past week. Although the Steubenville rape case story has received scant mention on conservative websites, the story has been covered extensively by mainstream media, pop culture shows  and top left leaning blogs.

Read the whole thing.

It’s worth asking once again, “What’s Gotten into the Water at CNN,” but as Stranhan’s article highlights, the question isn’t exclusive to the beleaguered division of the Time-Warner-CNN-HBO conglomerate;  “MSNBC’s ‘Ed Show’ asks who’s the ‘real’ victim in Steubenville rape case” as well, Twitchy notes.