What Serial Gets Wrong Analysis

Josie Duffy’s analysis of Serial, a pod-cast about the murder of a Korean girl, is reviewed in her Gawker article “What Serial Gets Wrong”, by examining the many journalistic flaws portrayed in the podcast, from the author, Sarah Koenig. What Koenig forgets to imply is the flawed justice system of 1999’s America, the economic problems the city of Baltimore faced, and her intent of portraying a teen drama rather than an actual crime investigation like it should have been. Duffy addresses that Koenig doesn’t answer the critical question, on what flaws occurred to convict Adnan and instead Koenig comes up with her own assumption on lousy police work or the court room being biased against Muslims all in a span of less than an hour. While she

justice system was in disarray. As State and private prison flooded the U.S. in the growing surge of the Super Predator Act, many young African Americans were convicted of crime, something Koenig knew while speaking to Adnan in prison during episode 10 of Serial were he states that, a majority of the people in the prison are black which Koenig simply nodes. On multiple occasions she factors in race but simply brushes it off, instead she believes its Jays lying and the investigators fault. In the book Crime and Punishment in America the author, Elliot Currie, states “by the mid-1990’s one in three young black men were under the “supervision” of the criminal justice system that is, in a jail or prison, on probation or parole or under pretrial release” (Currie, Pg.9). This is then in relation to Adnan Syed case when further read “the figure was two out of five in California, and over half in the city of Baltimore, Maryland” (Currie, pg. 9). While Adnan wasn’t black the staggering numbers that a majority of blacks were in prison coupled with the Super Predator act of the 90’s had clear marks throughout the serial pod-cast but Koenig simply chooses that it’s not important. Although with the overwhelming fact, the truth is mass incarcerations happened to blacks as well as minorities, but with Adnan being Muslim in the 90’s didn’t mean he would be under suspicion to commit