Response to Dharun Ravi (New York Times)

The article in The New York Times on Dharun Ravi gives a brief description of who Ravi and Tyler Clementi were and what Ravi did. It also gives an explanation to what charges Dharun Ravi was convicted of and how they were placed. The next thing it provides is who the people were and what questions were asked in the trial. Two of the people in the trial were Julia McClure (the first assistant prosecutor of Middlesex County) and, most importantly, "M.B," who was with Clementi when the camera was turned on. A few students at Rutger's university testified against Ravi. These students were Michelle Huang, Lokesh Ojha, and Molly Wei. Molly Wei was a friend of Ravi's who was formally charged of spying on Clementi too, but those charges were dropped in exchange for community service hours.

As much I liked how much everything in this article was easy to understand, that same factor made me feel as though the author was biased. The first thing that struck me was the short and sweet summary of the whole situation in the first paragraph. I feel like a complicated case like this deserves something longer. However, the part that stood out the most was when the author mentioned that Dharun was not charged with contributing to the fact that Clementi killed himself. Why? Because this was stated as one sentence in it's own separate paragraph. The fact that it was written this way led me to believe that the author of this wanted the readers to feel a sense of shock, the same sense of shock that the author had himself when he learned about this. I think that the author should have kept that feeling to himself in order to let the readers decide whether the fact that he was not charged was surprising or not.