I will be in the audience at “The Duke Lacrosse Case: A Rush To Judgment and Journalism’s Future” at the National Press Club this morning. Participants are Stuart Taylor, columnist and co-author (along with KC Johnson) of Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case; Joseph Neff, reporter for The Raleigh News & Observer; and Rem Reider, editor of The American Journalism Review.
Writer John Leo mentions the Duke case and the Christian-Newsom murders in his article about selective news coverage. (Hat tip: MM)
Although this post is closed, Notes on “The Rap on Culture” is open for discussion. The 16-page study I linked to is a must-read.
Report later…
Update (5/23 @ 7:00 a.m.): The National Press Club flyer reads:
“Spurious rape charges against members of the Duke University lacrosse team triggered a year’s worth of emotional news stories, blogs, and 24/7 media specials. Many allegations were flung and many reputations ruined, but in the end all charges were dropped. Now, the original prosecutor himself faces potential charges, and journalists must work through the wreckage to find lessons for the future.”
In the beginning…
The moderator was Alicia Mundy of the National Press Club Newsmaker Committee. A self-admitted liberal, Mundy began with a summary of the year-long Duke lacrosse case and shared an anecdote about panelist Stuart Taylor.
Taylor, columnist and co-author of Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case, realized very early on that prosecutor Mike Nifong didn’t have much of a case. He rushed a column to print in April 2006, worried that his column might be old news and others would beat him to the punch with this revelation. Taylor assumed many other journalists had reached similar conclusions, and he wanted to get his piece in. He was wrong. His was the only opinion piece from a member of the mainstream media (MSM) who was skeptical about the case.
Joseph Neff (pictured below right), an investigative reporter for The Raleigh News & Observer, said that national media descended on Durham. The first two weeks were “nuts.” The Duke case was “the most competitive story my newspaper has ever seen,” Neff said.
Rem Reider, editor of The American Journalism Review, said that “in the heart of the chase,” it’s tough not to rush to judgment and not get caught up in with the mob. Sometimes stories are taken beyond their news value because of the 24-hour news cycle. Journalists should be skeptical when covering stories. He reminded the audience of mostly aspiring young journalists (and me!) that the MSM are not a monolith.
Reider added that there was plenty of reason to have been skeptical about the Duke case early on, given the lack of evidence.
Mundy briefly mentioned the “blondes in distress” phenomenon, where stories of missing blonde women dominate news coverage for weeks on end. She asked Neff how much this media phenomenon affected his newspaper’s coverage. (Neff may have answered the question, but my notes don’t indicate it.) Neff talked about the group of 88 Duke professors that took out an advertisement, which was filled with anonymous, third-hand quotes from black students who claimed they felt oppressed and/or threatened at Duke.
Neff said the “Group of 88″ didn’t get on his paper’s radar until about a month after the ad ran. Local protests had more of an impact. His paper was getting calls from national media outlets that essentially wanted local reporters to come on their shows and do the reporting for them. According to Neff, hardly anyone at his paper obliged.
DNA
Taylor said that it was “pretty darned obvious” to any reasonable reporter by mid-April that the Duke case was full of holes. He discussed the DNA and how Nifong himself said the DNA would tell the story, ruling out players while proving others were involved.
In March 2006, the lacrosse captains put out a statement through Duke, asserting that there was no rape, that they were innocent, and that the DNA would prove it, just as Nifong had said. We all know what happened after the results came back. There was no DNA match between any of the 46 white lacrosse players tested and the stripper who cried rape.
At this point, Taylor asked, why didn’t the media press Nifong about this? The prosecutor said the DNA results would exonerate the innocent, so why, in the absence of a match, did Nifong continue with this case and the national media ignore the lack of a DNA match?
Joe Drape Exits, Duff Wilson Enters…
It was obvious that Stuart Taylor is no fan of the New York Times. He said the NYT was “infected” with political correctness, which affects the editors, reporters, and the way the paper covers news. A reporter named Joe Drape had written something about the Duke case, which the defense liked. They sent him information, hoping he’d do a big story about the mounting exculpatory evidence. Taylor, who must have first-hand knowledge of this, said Drape’s editors took him off the story and didn’t run it. The paper put another reporter on it.
Enter Duff Wilson, the NYT reporter who wrote a lot of Duke case stories. Wilson has been roundly ridiculed in the blogosphere because of his biased reporting.
Example: For one of his stories, Wilson relied on a 35-page report from one of the investigators. Neff said that he’d gone through Nifong’s 1,800-page document dump for a story he was writing and planned to use the 35-page report as an example of what was wrong with the case, yet Wilson based his entire story on it.
Taylor talked about the power and influence of the blogosphere and the dedication exhibited by some of the bloggers covering the case. He specifically mentioned LieStoppers (and KC Johnson, of course) and its thorough parsing of Duff Wilson’s big story.
Danger of the Narrative
Neff said that his editor had a “gut feeling” in the beginning that something wasn’t right about Crystal Mangum’s story and that his paper has a strict policy against using anonymous sources.
How should reporters cover cases like Duke? As long as reporters cover crime stories as routine court cases instead of as “metanarratives” of race, class, and such, they should be OK. The problem arises when reporters go beyond news gathering and rely on stereotypes rather than on facts. The narrative is quickly set, and other coverage reinforces it. In the Duke case, the narrative was that a group of racist, drunken, rich, white frat boys had raped a poor, oppressed black woman who went to school and worked to feed her children.
Even after more facts about Mangum came out, the narrative was set. What did we find out about her? That she was a “prostitute,” a word Taylor used, wasn’t much of a student and had a history of mental problems.
Even after “second stripper” Kim Roberts admitted on “60 Minutes” — national TV — that she threw the first punch, so to speak, by calling one of the players “small dick white boy,” the narrative was that she and Mangum were called niggers by the players. One player — one player — said something about thanking her grandfather for picking the cotton that made his shirt after her conjecture about his private parts.
Even after the “60 Minutes” airing, said Taylor, the NYT still was reporting that neighbors (fact: only one neighbor) heard players (fact: only one player) call Roberts a nigger (unverified).
Naming the Victim
Mundy asked about naming the accuser. Neff said that although the decision was not unanimous, his paper decided to name her. Taylor said he thought it was long past time to name her, although he has mixed feelings about naming victims. When papers name people accused of rape, it carries a presumption of guilt. What’s the remedy? If you don’t want to name the accuser, don’t name the accused, either.
Q&A
Race — I asked the first question, directed to all three journalists: “Were there any black reporters you knew who were skeptical about Mangum’s rape story from the beginning?”
Neff said that his paper’s photo editor, who is black, wouldn’t run a picture of the lacrosse players with their faces covered as they went to the police station. It made them look guilty, the editor said, and he thought it was too early in the case to run it. The paper ran the photo five weeks later.
Race is a sensitive issue in the newsroom. Reider mentioned the dangers of groupthink. A reporter’s job is to report facts. They make mistakes when they rush to judgment and follow the mob.
MSM is the story — An aspiring journalist wondered about the lack of self-reflective stories from the media in the aftermath of the case. Why did national media converge on this case, why did MSM cover the case the way they did, and why, in the aftermath, haven’t we seen self-reflective stories from MSM? In other words, the media’s biased coverage of the case should be THE story.
Taylor said that MSM does not like to explore its own errors. National media grabbed at a phony story, and few papers are willing to admit their biased coverage. He said the NYT became a laughingstock for its blanket and repeated coverage of the Augusta National Golf Club a few years ago. They wasted reporters and space on a non-story.
Reider said that the MSM’s coverage of the story is the new story and admitted that his publication, The American Journalism Review, should address this but hasn’t so far.
Bloggers — Someone asked Neff about bloggers. Did he find blog coverage of the case worth reading? He said he found well-researched and sourced blogs useful but didn’t find anonymous blogs very helpful. He did mention getting a scoop from the LieStoppers blog discussion board. The governor who appointed Nifong wouldn’t go on the record about Nifong recusing himself from the case. Neff said he learned, through the LS board, that the governor had spoken somewhere and denounced Nifong. Someone at the paper contacted the governor to confirm, and the governor went on the record.
In response to another question, Neff noted that many journalists got off to a bad start reporting the Duke case. They reported what Nifong told them. Why, in the same vein, didn’t they report what the NC attorney general said, who called the players “innocent”? Perhaps because it didn’t fit the narrative they’d stuck to for over a year.
Taylor added that even this far down the road, the NYT still is printing errors about the Duke case.
Reider closed the discussion with this: Let the Duke case be a lesson for young journalists. Try to avoid the rush to judgment and mob mentality. Report crime stories like the Duke case as routine court cases. That will help keep the focus on facts, not stereotypes.
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After the discussion, I spoke off-the-record with Stuart Taylor, who told the audience that he’s read some of my Duke case coverage (hope I make it into his book!) and Joseph Neff about various aspects of the media’s coverage. I also met a non-indicted Duke lacrosse player’s father, who said he’d read and liked my Duke case blogging.
Thanks for linking KC, Mark, NewsBusters, LieStoppers, Lorie, and Ace.
