Does it matter that the guy who helped free the captives in Ohio has served time?

@SuperMouse You could ask the women that were freed. I’m pretty sure I know their answer. Muck raking for sure.
Edit. I didn’t mean that to sound smartassed. It was just the first thing that popped into my mind.

It’s muck raking, whatever that is.

He was in the right place in the right time and did what any normal human would do. End of story, pretty much. It’s sad the media would even publish this.

“Next on the 11’o clock news: Are convicts and drug dealers saving your children from harm? Tune in to see.”

I used to have so much respect for Salon. They’ve been a huge disappointment over the past year or so. This is a good example.

@Blackberry muck raking.

This reminds me of dialogue from Pirates of the Carribean…

James Norrington: One good deed is not enough to save a man from a lifetime of wickedness.

Jack Sparrow: Though it seems enough to condemn him.

James Norrington: Indeed.

Does one good deed make this guy a good person despite his past? No. Does it make him a bad person that he has such a past? No. I don’t think it should matter either way in this case. He deserves praise for what he did, despite his criminal history, especially when we know next to nothing about it.

Isn’t the story here that three women and a child were rescued from a despicable kidnapper? Shouldn’t that be enough to satisfy the media and public, at least right now?

The answers, sadly, are no and no.

Muckraking isn’t a bad or negative thing. This isn’t muckraking, it is someone trying to dig deeper into a story but they aren’t being guided by a good editor to look deeper into the actual story. Besides the actual kidnapping, the kidnapper(s), the life of the women; there is also the story about the hero Charles Ramsey.

Ive never cared for Salon’s style of writing. But the story in Salon is really from reporting the Smoking Gun. It says so in the link you posted, @SuperMouse. I think the Smoking Gun story was actually better writing and a better read. It was more of a story looking at the hero. Neither story was written as good as it could have been, but Smoking Gun did a much better job.

For most reasonable people it would be irrelevant. People are hungry for more news about this story so they’re (media) going to publish whatever they find.

I wonder if he owned any AR-15 assault rifles.

If he did, I’ll bet the NRA would find a way to pay for his defense.

He did notice in the interview with Anderson Cooper that he was wearing a backward baseball cap. That says it all. ~

I love the interview with him. As someone on my FB page described it, “he keeps it real” You really have to see the interview to have a full appreciation of it.

Frankly, I don’t care about his past or what his motives might have been. He did what neither the police nor other neighbors did—which was to get the ladies the hell outta there. I think he deserves his 15 minutes or more of fame.

It’s a shame that we can’t have a happy ending. Everybody involved has to take a fall. There’s one real hero in this whole story and this guy is it. No good deed goes unpunished.

I vote muckraking. Of the worst kind.

The simple fact of the matter is that every story of this kind could be described with the headline “flawed human being performs heroic act.” The only difference here is that someone discovered what the specific flaw in this case was and decided to proclaim it far and wide for the continued entertainment of readers everywhere.

It’s not that journalists don’t have a right to discover and report these sorts of things, nor even that Ramsey’s background isn’t of some legitimate interest. The problem is that nobody seems to think about the proper way to frame information anymore—and that’s what makes this not muck raking, but sensationalism.

We can and should give credit to this man who helped free the captive regardless of his past misdeeds or crimes. Praising a recent good deed does not in any way pass comment on any past misdeeds for which this person may have been responsible. If anything it shows that even people with a history of terrible behaviour towards a woman can still demonstrate pro-social, admirable behaviour towards women.

If we can’t accept that people can change and learn from their mistakes, then we have no needs for jails or prisons at all. After conviction for violent crimes, the person convicted can be just be immediately executed.

I like him, he deserves his 15 minutes of fame and he is making the most of it. But the media is the media and I guess that is just the way it is whether we like it or not. It does seem completely irrelevant in this situation.

That article is terrible. How dare they. I hope MSNBC, CNN, Fox, ABC, CBS, NBC the New York Times and all other large media outlets don’t pick up that horrible story!

Now we are going to discourage good behavior by letting people know they risk all their dirty laundry and past bad behavior being dredged up and put out there for the population at large to know. I realize his felony convictions are public record, but still. Why should anyone, call the police, get involved, help in general, if this can happen?

I guess maybe before they give someone the key to the city officials, should look into someone’s background, but come on, they need to give it a rest.

I don’t read Salon regularly, but there is one woman who works for them, or used to, not sure, that I see on TV all the time and I can’t stand her. She makes liberals sound like idiots in my opinion. I don’t think this about everyone at Salon, I have seen other discussion lead by Salon journalists that were very interesting, but this woman is the one I see out there all the time.

I just told my husband about the story, that the guy who helped the girls in Cleveland has a felony record of domestic abuse, and his response was, “so what.”

Nope – don’t mean a thing.

Maybe this will show some people that people that did the crime and the time, deserve a second chance at redemption. Maybe they can even get real jobs like the rest of us, too.

Well, he might go on to beat up another wife or one of his own children, or whatever he did. We have no idea if he is recovered from his failings, we only know he will help a girl in trouble. It’s two separate things. There are men all around who seem to have good characters and then behind closed doors to their families they are monsters at times. We know nothing about the man really. All we know is he deserves a little credit for the good he did that day.

@JLeslie I think you hit the nail on the head. They are two separate things. Dude did something heroic, but we really need to be careful before we start trying to canonize him.

His past is irrelevant to this case. He was in place at the right time and did the right thing.

His past MIGHT BE relevant for anyone who plans on becoming romantically involved with him, but for the rest of us it’s just miscellaneous gossip apropos of nothing.

It’s sure not muckraking (muckraking is about uncovering dirty deeds by corporations and government), and it’s not useful. Unless the point is that people who did time can reform themselves, and the guy consented to it for that very purpose, it’s simply unethical to parade the fact that he did time. It’s nobody’s business but his, and irrelevant to his act.