Morality Isn't That 'Complex'

How do you describe a man who has four children out of wedlock and then murders a pregnant girlfriend?

To CNN, he's “complex.”

CNN says Ohio policeman Bobby Cutts Jr. just had a “complex personal life” in a headline added to a June 26^thAssociated Press story.  Neither CNN nor Cutts's stepmother view Cutts as “evil” or “twisted.” They tell the story as if circumstances simply drove a good man to do an evil thing. 

“A lot of people are looking at him like a bad person, but he's not, he really isn't,” said his stepmother Barbara Cutts, according to AP.

What about Cutts's responsibility for his heinous crime?  Cutts fathered four different children with three different women, and then he murdered Jessie Davis along with his own unborn child.  Cutts chose a lifestyle of promiscuity and then capped it off with a malicious act of inhumanity.  But CNN's headline leaves the impression that it wasn't his fault.  Do they think the Fates made him do it? 

David Niedrauer is an intern at the Culture and Media Institute, a division of the MediaResearchCenter.