From the cone of silence to Emily Litella

This weekend the Raleigh News and Observer decided to thrown Mike Nifong under the bus. Or maybe it is more correct to say they are trying to throw him under the bandwagon even as they slip off it unnoticed.

The N&O was an eager, energetic recruit to Nifong's righteous crusade. (See this post)

To follow along Robert KC Johnson's SNL theme: They have emerged from the cone of silence as Emily Litella.

Johnson is exactly right when he describes Ruth Sheehan's March 27 screed as "one of the most reprehensible columns on the case." If you read Sheehan's latest effort you will find no hint of a mea culpa. Instead, she wants to blame it all on Nifong.

Say all you want about the media's rush to judgment. But the truth is we report on allegations and charges out of district attorneys' offices every single day. And when a DA, especially one with Nifong's reputation for being a quiet, behind-the-scenes guy, comes out not only saying that a rape occurred, but that it was a brutal gang rape, in which the woman was strangled and beaten, you had to figure he had incontrovertible evidence.

This touches on one of the abiding concerns of this blog: the way the media cozies up to prosecutors during investigations. They toss aside their cynicism about elected officials when it come to the politicians with the most unchecked power in the country-prosecutors.

This tendency is not innocent; journalists do it to cultivate sources in order to score "exclusives" and get photo-friendly perp walks.

Even worse, Sheehan still holds to the liberal double standard that helped get her into this predicament. She worries that the case "has torn off the scabs on race and class-in Durham and beyond."

To quote the second dancer-"what a crock". The case is about an alleged rape. What tore the scabs off was the way the media-including the News and Observer-used it to highlight issues of class, race, and gender.

In doing so the media demonstrated once again their unlimited tolerance of double standards. They only pick at the scab when the defendants are white and the victims are minority or female. Only white nationalists look at the Carr brothers in Wichita and see something emblematic about race relations in America. But all the best outlets were happy to do so when it came to the Duke lacrosse team. Closer to Sheehan's beat is the case of the UNC Islamic hit and run driver. That incident, the MSM informs us, is only about one isolated, angry young man. It is not terrorism; it tells us nothing about the Islamic students who attend our colleges.

To the MSM some crimes are just crimes while other crimes are significant social markers. In some cases, journalists are so eager to play sociologists (talk about low aspirations) that they forget that they need to establish what happened before they hold forth on "what it means.'