Last week, I criticised Media Matters for objecting to the Wall Street Journal including a discussion about due process of law in an article about college sexual assault.
Now I will criticise someone for going too far in the opposite direction to Media Matters.
Fox's Outnumbered was recently discussing the alleged, now apparently disproven (fault of Rolling Stone, not Jackie) UVA rape case. Andrea Tantaros made the following comments, via Raw Story.
Some were reasonable, such as this:
They’re (Rolling Stone, not rape victims) just looking for stories and if they don’t get them, they’ll just make it up. But there’s a bigger theme happening… this hurts women, this hurts victims of sexual assault.
[...]
This is a real problem. They say there’s no opportunity to discover the facts, there’s no opportunity to confront witnesses and to present a defense. This also hurts lower income students because they can’t retain legal representation. They cannot fight back.
But this is silly:
And I’m going to speak slowly here so all the feminist blogs can get this one because I’m sure they’ll clip it. There is a war happening on boys on these college campuses.
No one should characterize cracking down on sexual assault as a war on boys. I agree that some male students have been victims of kangaroo courts (although not in the same numbers as sexual assault victims), but this does not add up to a "war on boys". I do think that there have been more than an outlier number of cases of due process failures. I don't think they are fringe. But it's very irresponsible to say that it is part of a plot to deliberately ruin male students.