Duke lacrosse: The AJR review

The American Journalism Review has a long article that assesses the media’s performance on the case.

Justice Delayed

It does a stellar job covering the main points from the beginning to the end of the case.

The first thing that stands out is how few of the media bigwigs will take responsibility or admit to mistakes.

Times Executive Editor Bill Keller says criticism of his paper's performance has "in some instances been unfair to the point of hysteria." But he also says, "I think we were a little slow to get traction on the story, frankly. Partly we were slow figuring out who had custody of the story: sports, national, investigative. It took us awhile to get specific people focused on this as their responsibility."

He makes it sound like The Times was guilty of not giving the story its due. As all who followed the case know, (and as the AJR points out) The Times ran over 100 articles on an out of state crime story. Worse, their big name sports columnists were happy to dive in and condemn the lax players from the get-go.

Like the DPD, Keller wants to blame the wrongly accused for his paper’s mistakes.

Keller says the Times tended to cover the saga episodically "rather than early on focusing a lot of investigative energy on the story. It took us longer than it should have for us to give the holes in the prosecutor's case the attention it deserved." He adds that reporters' jobs were complicated initially because the defense wasn't talking.

What a crock. A month into a case there were three facts that should have made all fair-minded reporters take a close look at the case. First, the DA was in a tough primary election campaign. Second, the players eschewed the easy and expected defense strategy: “she consented”. Instead, they insisted that no sexual encounter took place between the escort and any lax player. This was a dangerous position to take because DNA tests could blow it out of the water. Third, the DNA results confirmed that there was no attack as described by the accuser.

When Stuart Taylor’s first article appeared, there was no excuse for any reporter not to take another look at the story they were pedaling. Very few did. That should shame the MSM and helps explain why so few people believe them.

Newsweek’s Evan Thomas still justifies the most grievous sin of the case:

“The narrative was properly about race, sex and class... We went a beat too fast in assuming that a rape took place... We just got the facts wrong. The narrative was right, but the facts were wrong."

As usual KC Johnson has the best response to this line of “argument”:

If the facts are wrong, though, why explore the narrative at all? Is it fair to use the Duke lacrosse players to tell a larger story of athletes run wild--a theme that appeared not only on sports pages but also was splashed, repeatedly, on the front pages of major newspapers and amplified on cable shoutfests? Says Johnson: Once the facts are "proven not to be true, you certainly have to consider whether the narrative is relevant."

Thomas’s stance is simply bigotry dressed up as sociology. (See more here).

Stuart Taylor offers some good advice to reporters:

Asked what the media should learn from the Duke case, Taylor, sounding exasperated, strikes a similar note. "Read the damn motions," he says. "If you're covering a case, don't just wait for somebody to call a press conference. Read the documents."

I doubt, however, that they will take it. Digging for facts is hard work and most MSM pundits prefer to get by with a combination of trendiness, laziness, arrogance, and knowingness. They also evince an amazing condescension toward outsiders who do the work that the media refuses to do. More than one journalist mocked bloggers for their “obsession” with the case when confronted with inconvenient facts. (A Newsday hack did it just this week.)

One last point. Nancy Grace stays true to form and hides behind her spokesman rather than answer hard questions about her coverage of the case.