Wow! Isn't blowing a confidential source a grave journalistic sin?

David Graham, former editor of the Duke Chronicle, broke a pledge of confidentiality to John in Carolina . His main justification seems to be spite and wounded ego . Little whiny boy did not like the criticism JiC had of his handling of the Duke lacrosse case.

Gang of 88: Still at it

Fortunately, KC Johnson is also still on the beat. Wahneema Lubiano tries to rewrite history; KC slices and dices.

Duke lacrosse: two years later

Liestoppers notes that 24 March marks the anniversary of the start of the Durham hoax.

Two years ago - The Hoax/Frame went public

On March 24 2006 the Duke Lacrosse Hoax/Frame exploded into the local media with the interview of Durham PD Cpl David Addison on local TV and in the News-Observer & Herald-Sun, both local newspapers. Today we are running a re-post of our Nov 13, 2006 Blog article which explained how the Hoax was promoted from a local story to a National media frenzy.

I ran across two other items that suggest that the issues raised by the case go beyond Durham and Duke

This article predates the lacrosse case:

When Is It RAPE?

What is striking is that some activists are willing to defend false accusations of rape as a legitimate tool for payback:

This line of reasoning has led some women, especially radicalized victims, to justify flinging around the term rape as a political weapon, referring to everything from violent sexual assaults to inappropriate innuendos. Ginny, a college senior who was really raped when she was 16, suggests that false accusations of rape can serve a useful purpose. "Penetration is not the only form of violation," she explains. In her view, rape is a subjective term, one that women must use to draw attention to other, nonviolent, even nonsexual forms of oppression. "If a woman did falsely accuse a man of rape, she may have had reasons to," Ginny says. "Maybe she wasn't raped, but he clearly violated her in some way."

Catherine Comins, assistant dean of student life at Vassar, also sees some value in this loose use of "rape." She says angry victims of various forms of sexual intimidation cry rape to regain their sense of power. "To use the word carefully would be to be careful for the sake of the violator, and the survivors don't care a hoot about him." Comins argues that men who are unjustly accused can sometimes gain from the experience. "They have a lot of pain, but it is not a pain that I would necessarily have spared them. I think it ideally initiates a process of self-exploration."

Clearly, for a sub-species of pot-bangers, truth is irrelevant.

This news story is current:

Woman pleads guilty to false rape report

A 22-year-old former Woodinville woman pleaded guilty Tuesday to making a false rape accusation against a local college professor last June.

Katherine M. Clifton lied to police and and falsified official documents. Martha Stewart got five months in prison for that. This loony woman will serve eight days in jail. Incidentally, that sentence is one day shorter than the time her victim served after he was arrested because of her lies.

Selena Roberts is still smug, stupid, and hateful

That's my headline. KC Johnson is much more of a gentleman but he has the details here:

Selena Roberts: Still Misleading

Duke lacrosse

The indispensable KC Johnson has gone on hiatus. He did, however, give us a useful guide through the case as he covered it on his blog:

Glossary

The perfect starting point for anyone coming late to the story as well as a great reference for those who have followed the case from the beginning.

Duke lacrosse: KC Johnson sums up

KC Johnson's indispensable Durham in Wonderland is going on hiatus. His last post is a terrific summary of the case and its implications.

Legacies

I think he is dead on about the coverage by the drive-by media:

It is difficult to offer an explanation other than the obvious for the records of figures such as Wilson, Feinstein, or Ashley—namely, that this was a story that some in the intelligentsia so much wanted to be true that they blinded themselves to reality.

The Huckabee beat down

I don't know what to make of the Wayne Dumond story. Maybe it is Willie Horton redux. Or, perhaps, it is a Duke lacrosse case with a tragic ending.

A couple of stories are important background because they show how the case looked when Huckabee had to deal with it.

The Castration of Wayne DuMond

Talk Left on Wayne Dumond

One thing is for certain. Right-wing pundits are as hypocritical as their left-wing brethren. In the case of "Scooter" Libby and (late) in the Duke lacrosse hoax, right-wing opinion-mongers professed a deep concern about due process, the presumption of innocence, and the danger of out-of-control prosecutors. All of that has been tossed aside in the attacks on Huckabee.

Failing upward

Editor Melanie Sill is leaving the Raleigh News and Observer

Melanie Sill is named The Bee's new top editor

Of course, the PR flacks and internal spin-meisters want to put the best face on it:

Sill was in the thick of one of the most explosive stories to hit North Carolina in recent years, the accusations of rape against a group of Duke University lacrosse players.

After the players were eventually exonerated, the national media were roundly criticized for taking the rape allegations at face value

.That may be how it looks inside the media bubble. For those of us who followed the case, The N&O’s performance was abysmal on many, many levels. In fact, I’d argue that the paper’s performance won it the coveted title of “most embarrassing screw up in the annals of daily journalism.”

Previous high-profile scandals (Janet Cooke, Jayson Blair) involved individual malfeasance and slipshod editorial oversight. The Washington Post and New York Times also deserve credit for how they handled their screw-ups. When questions arose about their stories, the bosses investigated, took action, and told the public what went wrong.

Contrast that with how the N&O handled the lacrosse case. Their attacks on the players was not the work of a single rogue reporters. The editors pushed the story hard and flooded the zone to trash the team. In short, the paper failed to get the story right when they were trying very hard to get the story.

What really hurts the N&O is not that they made mistakes. Rather, it is their obstinate refusal to acknowledge those mistakes. Unlike the Times and the Post, they have refused to give a full explanation of what went wrong and how they intend to prevent future errors.

It is understandable that a young reporter got conned by a sob story. It is embarrassing that her editors bought the same story that ignited the firestorm. It is ludicrous that the paper still defends their early reporting and tries to shift the blame to “national media.”

OTOH, it paid off for Sill who gets a nice promotion and a ticket out of Raleigh.

Two other points:

We see again how “public editors” work mainly as PR flacks for their paper:

The News & Observer's public editor said the paper did a far better job than most of digging beneath the surface but committed some "serious missteps" in the first few weeks, including making references to the accuser as "a victim."

Once again, they praise themselves with faint damns.

Also, this is worth a laugh to those who followed Sill’s blog and her testy relationship with internet readers:

Hailed as a risk taker who will push the newspaper further into the Internet age

On to the trial!

Civil suit in lacrosse case filed

The city of Durham, former District Attorney Mike Nifong and the DNA laboratory hired by the disbarred ex-prosecutor conspired to falsely charge three Duke lacrosse players with rape, a federal civil lawsuit filed Friday alleges.

The 162-page document, a detailed account of every step of alleged misconduct that drips with indignation, sets the stage for a high-profile, high-stakes legal battle.

Duke lacrosse: The News and Observer hopes we are stupid

They apparently want credit for being "the first major publication to pick apart the prosecution’s case".

That claim is laughable to anyone who read what the N&O was printing in the summer of 2006.

In this post from January, i wrote:

But the truth is, they ran alot of stories on the Duke lacrosse travesty, however their coverage has not been fair, accurate, comprehensive, or exhaustive. They began with vicious attacks on the lacrosse team , a sanitized interview with the dancer/escort, and a docile acceptance of Nifong's statements. Since then they have made grudging attempts to cover the new developments fairly (Joseph Neff has done stand-out work) but they have also made many missteps. Most importantly, their coverage has not been comprehensive because they have never "exhaustively" examined their coverage nor owned up to their mistakes.

I think that is still a fair assessment.

If you read through these posts, you can see that the N&O was a Nifong-enabler long after they claim that they became an important critic.

Their culpability continues to this day. They know that the DPD lied in the early days of the case. Yet, they are unwilling to address those lies for the record. The reason is simple: those liars were important sources for the N&O.

Duke lacrosse: Until Proven Innocent

I’ve waited for months to read Stuart Taylor and KC Johnson’s Until Proven Innocent. Having finished it, I can say that it is worth the wait. The book is well-written and filled with new details. Even though I read KC’s blog every day, the book was still highly informative. For those who did not follow the case closely, UPI provides a clear, concise narrative of hoax and a thorough analysis of the issues that it raised.

Now that the lax players have been exonerated, it is easy for pundits to minimize the harm done by Nifong, Duke, the Durham police, and the MSM. Brian Loftus, a retired New York fire fighter, puts the lie to such revisionism:

I spent thirty-six hours in the World Trade Center after the 9/11 attacks. I thought that was the worst day of my life. But seeing what is happening to my son and his friends is worse.

The Duke case was, in some ways, a perfect storm. Radical professors, an ambitious and unethical prosecutor, agenda-driven journalists, and tabloid-cable sleaze-merchants exploited the case for their own ends. The Duke administration (with a few notable exceptions like Peter Lange) caved under the pressure. Taylor and Johnson document all of this in detail.

The striking thing about this injustice is that the Left-Right political spectrum was irrelevant in many ways. The Gang of 88 were on the Left and their actions were reprehensible in numerous levels. Yet, the most frightening “totalitarian whiff” from the whole affair came from Bob Steele--Wall Street plutocrat and under secretary of Treasure in the Bush administration:

Bob Steele also defended the firing of Pressler and everything else that Duke had done, while telling Trumpbour (as he had told Peter Boyer of the New Yorker) that 'even though it is not fair, people have to be sacrificed for the good of the organization.'

“People have to be sacrificed for the good of the organization”. At least left-wingers justify their actions in the name of utopian revolution. Bureaucrats like Steele and Burness sacrifice justice and integrity for a little positive PR.

I thought one of the most telling points in the book concerned the dashed hopes of James Coleman. Coleman, one of the genuine heroes of this sorry saga, thought the Duke case

provided a 'chance to engage' groups that ordinarily are little concerned with the rights of defendants and civil liberties, and perhaps create a multiracial coalition across ideological lines to seek fundamental reforms of North Carolina's criminal justice system.

Sadly, the “Right” flunked this test just as much as the “Left”. Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck still use Wendy Murphy as a “legal analyst” on their cable shows. O'Reilly even wrote the forward to her new book. This despite her disgusting performance during the lacrosse case:

In her Duke lacrosse case commentary on Fox, MSNBC, CBS, and CNN, Murphy compiled a record of demonstrably untrue statements, wholly unfounded speculation, and disregard for due process.

Criminal justice and political hacks

The Michael Vick case is going to be an interesting acid test for professional right-wingers. The Duke lacrosse case and the Scooter Libby trial found them defending due process and warning of the dangers of ambitious prosecutors. Now we’ll see if those positions were heartfelt and principled or simply a matter of political tactics and spin.

Newsbusters has already flunked.

Will the Vick Co-Defendant Plead-out Stop the Inane Duke Lacrosse Comparisons?

They are happy to engage in the sort of speculative pre-judgment that caused so much harm in Durham. Almost every point they make about Vick’s guilt is just an echo of what was said about the lacrosse players and Nifong in April 2006.

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.

The Duke perp walk

It was a piece of videotape that was replayed hundreds of times on television. Reade Seligmann and Colin Finnerty arriving for their arraignment, handcuffed, and in the back of police cars. Look, the pictures said, the DPD chased down two dangerous men.

It was one more lie in a case founded and perpetuated by lies. A story in the Brown Daily Herald tells us what really happened:

He and fellow sophomore Collin Finnerty, who was also indicted the day before, drove to the back of the Durham County jail, where they had arranged to meet officers. (Team captain David Evans, who held the party where the rape was said to have occurred, would be indicted a month later.) They were handcuffed and then driven 15 yards to the front of the jail, where camera crews were waiting, Seligmann says. He believes Nifong orchestrated the whole thing to maximize media attention.

The DPD and Nifong were acting in character. This little bit of drama is of a piece with the set-up on the DNA collection. It also confirms what Judge Sentelle wrote about the "perp walk" and its threat to justice:

The perp walk would be bad enough if the humiliation of the accused were the only intended or accomplished result. however, the walk, commonly conducted at such time as to achieve maximum media exposure, is displayed not just for family and neighbors of the accused, but for every potential juror who sees the front page of the newspaper or the beginning of the evening news.

Duke lacrosse: End of Act II

Real life legal cases rarely offer the drama of TV and movies. The Bar hearing for Durham DA Mike Nifong has been an exception. Today's session saw him announce his resignation from office while on the witness stand.

KC Johnson has been blogging from the hearings and he is, as usual, the best guide for all the developments.

Durham in Wonderland

Duke lacrosse: The books start coming


KC Johnson has a post up on two of the new books set to hit the shelves.

I reviewed the Yaeger book several weeks ago, but it makes sense to run it again.



Duke lacrosse: Most of the story is still untold


Millions of words have been written about the Duke lacrosse case. The players have been exonerated by North Carolina’s Attorney General. The casually jaded among us might wonder if there is anything left to say.

Judging by It’s Not About the Truth by Don Yaeger (with Mike Pressler) the answer is a resounding “Yes”. This sorry saga began with a flood of lies, spin, and bias. There is still a lot of truth to uncover from beneath that slimy rubble.

Yaeger is a writer for Sport Illustrated. Pressler, of course, was the coach of the lacrosse team when the hoax got off the ground. This book marks the first time that we hear Pressler’s side of the story. For that reason alone It's Not About the Truth is essential reading for anyone interested in the disaster that swept through Durham and Duke.

The story of the Pressler family is compelling. Their lives were thrown into turmoil; Mike Pressler lost his job. Yet, they displayed grace and integrity throughout the ordeal. After all the public whining by the Gang of 88, the Presslers a dramatic and refreshing change. Unfortunately, Duke kept the Chafes and the Farreds while driving the Presslers away. It takes a special, twisted institution to discard the wheat and hoard the chaff.

The book is not a first person account of the scandal and frame-up. Yaeger has done extensive shoe leather reporting; he interviewed over one hundred people to write this story. His access to Pressler and many lacrosse players enabled him to break new ground in reporting the hoax. But make no mistake, he did a lot of valuable research into all aspects of this case.

For instance, Brodhead and his loyal factotum Burness turn out to be more anti-lax and pro-Gang of 88 than they pretended to be. Burness, says Yaeger, “became famous for ‘off-the-record, not for attribution’, slamming of the players” to reporters.

Yaeger digs into the seamy world of the Platinum Club and Bunnyhole Entertainment. Samiha Khanna’s carefully crafted portrait of a shy student who was new to dancing is now thoroughly and completely discredited. On the very day that story appeared, she was videotaped dancing at the Platinum Club.

It’s Not About the Truth also provides new insight into the activities of the police and players in the crucial first days of the disaster. His reporting should shatter the myth of the “blue wall of silence”. At the same time, it paints an unflattering picture of the key investigators. Well before Nifong entered the picture Gottlieb, Himan, and Clayton were happy to take their shots at some rich Dukies even if that meant ignoring evidence and conducting a sloppy investigation. They are also not above telling a bald-faced lie or two.

I’ve only skimmed the surface of all the new information this book offers. There is much more. In fact, I could blog for a month just on the new perspectives made possible by Yaeger’s reporting. Any one who was interested in this case will want to read it. Every Duke parent and alum should read it.

Duke lacrosse: Ten days in March (II)

LieStoppers has a terrific piece of detective work on the crucial early days of the hoax:

How the Duke Rape Hoax Became the Duke Racial Epithets Crime-of-the-Century Hoax (and Remains So Today)

LieStoppers notes that the lax story exploded into the headlines because of the racial aspect: white-on-black gang rape after a prelude of racial slurs. What this article demonstrates is that this element of the narrative did not appear until 24 March. The early police statements do not contain the allegations of a barrage of slurs. Yet, suddenly, the Duke faculty hears of the epithets, the News and Observer gets an interview with the accuser who then claims, for the first time, that the dancers were the targets of racial epithets, and the Duke police inform the administration about the slurs.

As LieStoppers notes, “it may be coincidental, but it is certainly a notable convergence.” Of course, Goldfinger was more jaundiced: “Mr. Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: 'Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action.'”

Duke PR flack John Burness takes another hit in this piece. Yaeger has already noted that Burness “became famous for ‘off-the-record, not for attribution’, slamming of the players” to reporters.” Here we see that he passed along second-, third-, and fourth-hand accounts of the alleged slurs to faculty members,

In the early days of the hoax, Burness was fanning the flames. He helped turn a manageable PR crisis into a publicity nightmare that has tarnished both his employer and Duke students.

The News and Observer also comes off poorly in the LieStoppers article which shows that they have lied repeatedly about the 24 March interview with Precious. Nor have they ever come clean about the contacts between their reporters and the DPD. LieStoppers dissects both points with great skill.

Yaeger’s book adds one other crucial piece of information on this score. On 23 March the subpoena for the DNA dragnet was issued. The players decided not to fight the broad (overly broad?) request. They even decided to make it easy on the police and go immediately to the crime lab.

[Attorney Wes] Covington telephoned investigators and informed them that the players would arrive voluntarily as a group if it was promised the news would not be leaked to the media. Covington was assured the media would be kept unaware.

It was a lie. When the players arrived at the lab, they found the reporters waiting and the doors locked. The DPD had arranged the perfect perp walk for their media friends. The tabloid frenzy was about to begin.

The next day the story was on the front page of the News and Observer. The day after that came the notorious interview with the accuser. The N&O was leading the pack in pursuit of a story that was really a red herring.

The N&O has done a great job following up on Nifong’s mistakes and ethical lapses. They have shown no such interest in examining the actions of the DPD in the first 10 days of the hoax.

Is it because their reporters and editors were too eager to play the role they were assigned by the rogue cops?

The DPD’s lies and choreographed perp walk is another black mark against Duke. From the beginning of the hoax they knew that the players were cooperating and that the DPD was lying. Yet the administration was silent when the police and prosecutor claimed that there was a “blue wall of silence”. They did nothing while the police tried to run roughshod over their students. At times they even ran with the hounds as when they suspended McFayden for his stupid email.

To date, Duke has not owned up to their miserable cowardice.

Duke lacrosse: KC Johnson does the MSM’s job

A really great post on the Gang of 88’s listening ad:

The Group of 88: Non-Endorsement "Endorsements"

Several points demand attention in this latest batch of revelations.

1. It is more evidence of just how agenda-driven the Gang of 88 was. Not only were they willing to hijack the lacrosse case to serve their ends, they were also willing to lie and mislead about their departments’s support for that hijacking.

2. Hoax supporters have made a lot of hay out of the “fact” that the lax players used fake names at the party. This dubious assertion (based as it is on Precious’s word alone) was repeatedly thrown out to show that the players were up to no good from the beginning of the party.

Now, though, the tables are turned. The tenured potbangers who condemned the lacrosse team have a dirty little secret of their own. The brave listening statement not only used unverifiable quotes, it also came complete with fake endorsements.

3. No member of the Gang of 88 has broken ranks to condemn the dishonesty that KC has uncovered.

4. Duke senior vice president for public affairs John Burness justified the cancellation of the 2006 season because the party was a “team-sanctioned event.” For that reason, Duke had to act decisively because the events reflected badly on Duke. If one accepts this line of reasoning, it is all the more puzzling that Duke has been so circumspect about the Gang of 88 and their actions.

Duke has tried to minimize its connection to the ad and emphasizes that professors are free to speak their mind. But KC’s reporting makes this rationalization completely untenable. The Gang did their best to make the ad appear to be a university sanctioned statement. Moreover, to create this illusion they lied, dissembled, and violated normal academic procedures.

Surely, this calls for a clear statement from President Brodhead and, perhaps, some actions against the dishonest professors who claimed departmental endorsement for their agitprop.

5. I doubt that Duke will do any such thing. Through out this travesty they have treated the Gang of 88 with kid gloves. Early on they were solicitous and sought to placate them. When the hoax unraveled Duke tried to minimize the harm the Gang did and insisted that the professors were misjudged and mischaracterized.

If only they had done the same for their students. The lax players, however, were given no such benefit of the doubt. When they were condemnedcollectivelyas privileged, lawbreaking, violent, racist misogynists, only a handful of officials spoke up. Even then, no one tried to defend the party. No one made excuses such as this offered by the chairman of the Classical Studies Department on behalf of a tenured potbanger:

The department did not vote to endorse the ad. An individual faculty member gave the “go ahead,” and at least one member of the department was upset that this had happened without departmental consent. The action was well-intentioned, if in retrospect it may appear mistaken; it needs to be understood in the context of the immediate, highly emotional reactions to the first reports of the incident.

“In retrospect may appear mistaken”, “understood in the context”, “well-intentioned”. No one at Duke dared use language like this about a bunch of 18-22 year olds who held a spring break party. But they expect us to accept it when it is applied to middle-aged college professors who had days to weigh their actions.

Duke lacrosse: Not so wise guy

Another Washington Post sports columnist decides to weigh in on the lacrosse case:

Continuing Conflicts

A fundamental problem of the MSM is that pompous mental midgets like Mike Wise really think they are adding something valuable to the national discourse. In reality, the ignorant and uninformed just skip over their embarrassing eructations while those readers who are informed and engaged just marvel at the arrogant prejudice that the MSM happily puts on display.


See also:

A Word to the Wise

Duke lacrosse: Standing to criticize

Howard Kurtz is a smug little weasel

Duke lacrosse: Neff and Taylor at the National Press Club

La Shawn Barber attended the panel discussion and has an in-depth post on it:

Duke Case: Journalists’ Rush to Judgment

A couple of points caught my attention.

Joeseph Neff of the News and Observer is remarkably astute about the cable news shows:

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.

Some members of the MSM remain arrogantly obtuse:

[American Journalism Review editor] 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.

I don't know why Reider thinks that young journalists have a special need for this lesson. The student-run Duke Chronicle did a better job on this case than the New York Times. The people who should be chided are old bulls like John Feinstein who bloviate little regard to the facts.

Moreover, who is Reider to preach in light of this little nugget?

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.