I just think this is an odd editorial hill to die on. The BYU story is good, I agree, but TPM always has a mix of stories of various levels of importance.
By the way, a related reason that it’s helpful to highlight stories that are so pervasive as to seem not newsworthy that I didn’t fully touch on: When you have a problem that mostly affects one group, like women or black men, many of the people who don’t witness it have a hard time believing the stories. So, it’s easy for men who otherwise like Trump to assume these women are making things up. That happens on local levels too, which is why women are scared of not being believed when they report sexual assault. But on top of that there is a bit of a psychological defense mechanism that comes into play for some people. If you’re a white guy who never had trouble with the police, you don’t want to believe that some police have been treating black men terribly and getting away with it. You want to believe in a just world. Wanting a just world is nice I guess, but it can be rapidly twisted into something else-- denying the problem. Police have been treating black guys like shit for a long time. It was completely ignored until the Rodney King beating was captured on video, and Black Lives Matter has only made some progress nowadays because video evidence is so hard to deny.
As far as sexual assault goes, a lot of men cling to a notion that rapists are thugs lurking in dark alleys. Much like the notion that children are kidnapped and molested by strangers in a van. The truth is that sexual assaults and child abduction and abuse mostly are perpetrated by people known by the victims. This also holds for murders, by the way. This is a very hard thing to accept if you want to believe the world is just, that good and evil are obvious, and that people who don’t go looking for trouble usually don’t find themselves in trouble. That is, if you have the luxury of not being forced to accept it by dealing with it head-on. By highlighting many cases like this, it serves a similar purpose to showing all those videos of black men being killed by police. It puts the problem in people’s faces and makes them deal with it the way many women already are forced to. For many people, the first reactions to recent police shootings was to deny a problem, claim it was an isolated incident, or attack the victim’s character. That’s also what is often done to women who come forward to report sexual assault. After enough police tapes came out, a lot more people started to own up to the problem, even in some surprising places (RedState for instance). That doesn’t mean it’s a solved problem by any means, but you can’t solve something that most people refuse to acknowledge, either. I view sexual harassment and assault of women as a similar problem that we, as a society, still need to do a lot more work to mitigate. Many years ago much of this predatory behavior was considered completely normal, especially if the victim was single. Over time feminism helped change most people’s view on this, and laws were strengthened. But that only goes as far as society is willing to take it. There are still enough men with deeply regressive attitudes to make things hard for women, but they don’t all do it as overtly as before, if they don’t think those around them would be on board with it. In many cases, the behavior is simply still considered OK among their social circles. And many men just act opportunistically without thinking about “inconvenient” issues like consent. The point is that the only way to make most men understand that this is still a major problem is to beat us over the head with cases like this. We aren’t the ones getting groped, and most women don’t go around telling all their male friends about the time that acquaintance at a party slipped them a roofie. We can’t solve the problem without understanding it. And we can’t even count on the victims getting justice without forcing people to acknowledge that yes, this is a very common problem that can happen to any woman.