From Duke Lacrosse to the Unsinkable Donald Trump

Last night ESPN aired a new episode in their 30 for 30 documentary series. “Fantastic Lies” was a searing look back at the Duke lacrosse case/hoax/scandal.

Overall, it was an outstanding piece of work. Admittedly, it skimmed over a great many points and left out others. That is inevitable when you have to cover a complex, year-long, story in 90 minutes of television.

For what it is worth, here are a few of the points about the case that deserve more attention.

Journalists were not just wrong about the case. They were arrogantly, viciously, proudly wrong.

Reporters and pundits did not just attack the members of the lacrosse team. They attacked anyone who tried to defend the team and its players. The documentary really should have included the brave stand made by the Duke women’s lacrosse team and the vitriol they received from the press for proclaiming their belief in the ‘innocence’ of the men lacrosse players.

The documentary lets the MSM off the hook. It lets the clowns and kommissars claim that failure was inevitable because the story was “a perfect storm.”

Failure was not inevitable. Some people were not caught up in the perfect storm. “Fantastic Lies” would have been much better if it had included the thoughts from someone like Stuart Taylor on the failure of the media.

More detail on this point can be found here:

Duke lacrosse: The AJR review

Duke lacrosse: Can the MSM look into the mirror?

Duke lacrosse: “Totalitarian Whiff”

A small point but a telling one:

“Fantastic Lies” whitewashes ESPN’s participation in the media mob that abetted Nifong.

When the documentary hid this fact it continued a long tradition of smokescreens and fig leafs. In that sense it is emblematic of the media cover-up that has gone on for ten years. The MSM cannot look in the mirror and admit its mistakes.

Which is why this happened:

None of the MSM outlets that messed up so horribly did anything to reform themselves. Nor did the Duke administration.

The Gang of 88 still rules the roost in Durham. The MSM still falls for hoaxes like the Rolling Stone story on UVa and “Hands up. Don’t shoot.”

When Evan Thomas of Newsweek tried to defend the magazine’s indefensible rush to judgment he came up with one of the most quoted lines of the whole saga.

“We just got the facts wrong. The narrative was right, but the facts were wrong."

And that is what ties this into the Trump phenomenon. Journalists and their lapdog media critics keep whining that millions of people ignore their rigorous fact-checking and debunking of Trump’s claims and promises. They say they are puzzled and I bet they are. If they really understood what was happening they would be terrified.

Millions of voters ignore the MSM attacks on Trump because they assume the MSM is filled with liars who prefer the Narrative (i.e. propaganda) to facts and truth. That is not entirely correct and it does not make Trump a good choice for president, but it does help explain why so many happily ignore the MSM.

If the old media has lost power, it is because they wielded it recklessly and unwisely.

One last point in Trump’s favor.

When the MSM ginned up their unthinking outrage mobs, professional conservatives and Republican politicians were slow to respond. Some happily ran with SJW pack. Most hid and hoped it would blow over.

When a Trump supporter says they like DJT because “he fights”, the background context is the craven cowardice of resercons like Tucker Carlson and gutless politicians too numerous to mention.

UPDATE: It is only fair to note that Tucker Carlson has come a long way. A long, long way and in the right direction.

Tucker Carlson:Quite the transformation

No justice, no peace

The federal trial of the [LAPD] officers was as political as any trial of radicals during the Cold War.

Lou Cannon, Official Negligence: How Rodney King and the Riots Changed Los Angeles and the LAPD,

Yet the same MSM that never tires of telling the story of the poor "victims of McCarthyism" is happy to encourage even greater injustices if the target is a cop or other enemy of the left. (See Duke lacrosse hoax)

Newsweek, hoaxes, and addiction to the narrative

Newsweek editor Evan Thomas became infamous for defending his magazines mistakes in the Duke lacrosse hoax with the bizarre justification:

The narrative was properly about race, sex and class. . . . We just got the facts wrong. The narrative was right, but the facts were wrong.

Apparently, this attitude was not new when Newsweek went to Durham.

A couple of years later I was arguing the Tawana Brawley case with a Newsweek editor in a radio interview. When it became obvious that a) Brawley had been making the whole thing up and b) the editor knew very little about the case, he finally blurted out, “It really doesn’t matter. This case isn’t about one young woman being raped by a group of white men. It’s about the whole history of white men taking advantage of black women back to the days of slavery.” So there you have it. When the facts conflict with the narrative, the facts must give way.

Source:

HURRICANE CARTER EXONERATED AGAIN… AND AGAIN

RTWT

Duke lacrosse: Why you can’t trust what you read in the papers

There’s a new book on the Duke lacrosse case. In keeping with our Orwellian age, the publishers tout The Price of Silence as a comprehensive re-examination of the case which brings new information to light. As is often the case, what is new is not to be trusted. Cohan, in a triumph of perverse contrarianism, has decided to make Mike Nifong the victim of his tale.

KC Johnson has been demolishing Cohan’s book over at Durham in Wonderland. As always, he is the indispensable resource on the case.

Two recent reviews of the book deserve to be read together. David Shribman, executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, is largely laudatory in the Wall Street Journal. He inexplicably praises Cohan for “his meticulous research and even-handed tone.” He takes the author at his word that this book is a serious look at the case in all its complexity.

Jeff Neff of the Raleigh News-Observer brings a completely different perspective. As an investigative journalist who helped uncover DA Nifong’s abuse of power, Neff knows more about the case than any other working reporter. Where Shribman sees “meticulous research”, Neff shows us that Cohan failed to talk to many of the most important actors and sources in the drama. Moreover, Cohan’s omissions seem to reflect an agenda. The people he did not interview could (and did) demolish Mike Nifong’s self-exculpatory whining--said whining being the whole basis for Cohan’s revisionist narrative. Shribman is a respected journalist yet his ignorance--the unavoidable condition of most journalists on most stories--left him looking stupid, naïve, and/or biased.

I'm a jounalist whose job it is to explain to others things he does't understand himself.
Scott Shane, New York Times reporter

I am a journalist and so am vastly ignorant of many things, but because I am a journalist I write and talk about them all.
G. K. Chesterton

The problem of journalism in America proceeds from a simple but inescapable bind: journalists are rarely, if ever, in a position to establish the truth about an issue for themselves, and they are, therefore, almost entirely dependent on self-interested 'sources' for the versions of reality that they report.
Edward Jay Epstein, Between Fact and Fiction (1975)

As a reporter stumbles through the inevitable fog of ignorance, there is a powerful temptation to seize on those facts and interpretations that conform to the journalist’s ideological and cultural predilections. Add a measure of knowingness and the ignorance becomes, not a temporary state, but a hard protective shell. Put that journalist in the ideological monoculture that is the modern newsroom and the entire newspaper or network falls prey to folly and error.

Shribman’s review is a near perfect example of this tendency. He uses Cohan’s flawed narrative to ride his pet hobbyhorse--the over-emphasis of athletics on the modern campus. For instance, he and Cohan criticize Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski:

Moreover, his astonishment at the silence of basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski is clearthe revered Duke coach, often outspoken, was virtually absent from the debate about the lacrosse-team episode.

Shribman apparently sees no contradiction between this Coach K. bashing and the genesis of the scandal:

the predictable groups behaving predictably, the loudest advocates for social justice often too impatient to let legal justice take its course, the voices of reason drowned out by the clatter of cliché.

Duke would have been much better off if the Gang of 88 had emulated Coach K’s reticence.

Shribman’s ideological blinders and agenda-driven concern-trolling are evident in his concluding paragraph:

Do you suppose that a similar contretemps among members of Duke's Collegium Musicum would have gripped the nation? If the bad boys had been members of the Duke Players, who perform in Shaefer Theater, rather than the players of the Duke lacrosse team, who perform in Koskinen Stadium, would anyone beyond the Duke campus care? Would Mr. Cohan have written more than 600 pages? To ask the question is to answer itand to see what the real scandal on campus is today.

After I read that I wanted to ask Shribman, “What’s your favorite Woody Allen movie?”.

He wants us to believe that the Duke scandal or the Penn State scandal drew attention because athletics have out-sized importance on campus. It would follow, then, that the MSM’s muted response to crimes and possible crimes in the entertainment industry reflects the low cultural importance of movies, music and TV.

Right?

This, of course, is absurd.

It is much more likely that the MSM’s divergent response to the Bryan Singer story vs. the lacrosse case or Roman Polanski vs. Jerry Sandusky reflects the mores of the journalistic Guild. The Guild, after all, esteems Robert Lipsyte the sportswriter who hates sports. ESPN has “Outside the Lines” which investigates sports scandals and pseudo-scandals. Hollywood scandal-mongering, however, is something respectable newspapers leave to the checkout line tabloids and info-tainment shows.

One last point, after North Carolina AG Roy Cooper exonerated the players in 2007, the MSM immediately announced that it was time for everyone to “move on” and to put the story behind us. For six years there has been scant interest in revisiting the case, or Durham’s justice system, or the media’s malpractice in abetting an out of control prosecutor. Yet, with Cohan’s book, the “let’s move on” media has become interested in the lacrosse case once again.

They are like Captain Ahab in search of their preferred narrative.

Related:

Duke lacrosse: Auto de fe

I think this medieval custom explains a lot about the MSM’s poor performance in Durham. They cared little about the crime per se: respectable journalists and highly paid pundits don’t do crime stories. The case just provided a setting-a publicity hook-where they could deliver their sermons on racism, sexism, privilege, the sins of white athletes, and the need for change.

Changing Minds

Knowing this, it is easy to see why "60 Minutes" was so easily outdistanced by bloggers. Further, Gardner's work suggests that the MSM will suffer more such embarrassment at the hands of new media voices.

Journalists like to say they write the first draft of history, but as noted here, they are peculiarly resistant to revising that draft. They work in a professional echo chamber where their peers agree with them on almost all the big issues and they are unaccustomed to sharing "explanation space" with dissident voices. It is a milieu that does not weed out absolutist personalities. Moreover, their work is so public that admitting mistakes is very hard. In the case of television, so much work, time, and money get invested in a story that emotional commitment is almost inevitable.

New judgement

The Daily Howler ponders an important question. Why does the MSM leap to cover every legal problem of George Zimmerman while the murder trial of Crystal Mangum went into the memory hole? And why won't the MSM admit they did a lousy job covering Zimmerman from day one?

Goldie Taylor wants to help!

Why are some incidents widely discussed?

Hope you enjoy your big mug of Karma Mr. Wise

Washington Post Suspends Columnist for Twitter Hoax

See here:

Duke lacrosse: Not so wise guy

The revenge of the Beck-bots

A few days ago KC Johnson posted KC Johnson on cable's love affair with Wendy Murphy:

Wendy Murphy's Revival

KC made an altogether obvious and innocuous observation about the media landscape:

While I rarely watch cable news, I’m fully aware that—in the era of Glenn Beck—the medium is more “entertainment” than “news.”

It was not long before the Beck fans appeared in his comments to defend their hero who they felt was unfairly attacked.

Unfortunately for them, the facts are on Prof. Johnson's side. That Beck is an entertainer should be obvious to anyone who watches his show more than four or five times. That Fox News provides an outlet for the horrible, ill-informed Murphy is simply a fact.

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.

Lastly, as noted years ago, Beck is a lot like Murphy and the Gang of 88. None of them let the truth get in the way of their preferred narrative.




See also:

Duke lacrosse: How important is the Gang of 88?

When apologies were not in fashion

Since the MSM thinks apologies are the order of the day, Legal Insurrection has a few cases that deserve a mea culpa or three.

Still Waiting For Apologies

It's a lengthy list, but it only scratches the surface.

For example, since we now know that context is everything and editing video foortage is terrible, where are the apologies for the "Collateral Murder" propoganda from Wikileaks?

It's funny, in a sick kind of way, that Shirley Sherrod has become a martyr because she was went through a couple of days of bad press and unfair attacks. In terms of duration and viciousness, her "ordeal" is a day at the spa compared to what happened to the three falsely accused Duke lacrosse players.

So you might ask, how did the MSM handle their apologies back in 2007?

Short answer: grudgingly or not at all.

More than a few actually continued to attack the innocent players in order to cover for the media's failure.

Here is Terry Moran of ABC News

But perhaps the outpouring of sympathy for Reade Seligman, Collin Finnerty and David Evans is just a bit misplaced. They got special treatment in the justice system--both negative and positive. The conduct of the lacrosse team of which they were members was not admirable on the night of the incident, to say the least. And there are so many other victims of prosecutorial misconduct in this country who never get the high-priced legal representation and the high-profile, high-minded vindication that it strikes me as just a bit unseemly to heap praise and sympathy on these particular men

.
Mike Wise of the Washington Post:

Just because these players aren't felons, let's not instantly transform them into martyrs. It's okay to find middle ground in the good-and-evil spectrum, no matter what a certain D.A. tells you.

Media critic and Breitbart scourge Howard Kurtz:

The three players were not choir boys -- the team had, after all, invited a pair of strippers to a midnight party -- but they hardly deserved the national scorn of being loudly trumpeted as accused rapists.

Further examples can be found here for the Washington Post and here and here for Selena Robert of the New York Times.

Roberts provides another interesting insight into media double standards. Breitbart's mistake apparently puts him beyond the pale now and forever. Roberts's disgracefull performance brought out the protective side of her reporter friends.

ESPN just can't let it go

Duke won the NCAA lacrosse championship yesterday. As KC Johnson notes, the Worldwide Leader was not content to cover that story. They still want to slime the players with the false allegation from 2006.

Another victory for justice

Pressler Lawsuit Settled

Duke has settled its lawsuit with former lacrosse coach Mike Pressler. Having tried (and failed) to get the case thrown out before discovery, the University had little choice--I can't imagine the discovery in this case would have been pleasant.

Wow

Duke lacrosse accuser charged with arson


Mangum set clothing on fire in the bathroom tub in a bathroom located in the middle of the apartment. The apartment sustained heavy smoke damage, according to the Durham Fire Department.

The suspect reportedly filled the bathtub with clothes and set fire to it. Three children and the two adults were evacuated from the apartment at 2220 Lincoln St.

Stuart Taylor

The Rot At Duke -- And Beyond

Much of academia appears to have a disregard of due process and a bias against white males

The guild is still protecting Selena Roberts

Latest example over at KC Johnson's Durham in Wonderland:

Pearlman Defends Roberts

See also:

The guild is more important than the truth

Selena Roberts: Still lying

The guild is more important than the truth

Selena Roberts is on tour for her thinly sourced hatchet job on A-Rod. She hit a few bumps in the road when a few reviewers and journalists (like Jason Whitlock) brought up the Duke lacrosse case and Roberts's vicious, fact-challenged attacks on the lax players. (KC Johnson has documented Roberts's lies and evasions about the Durham hoax on his blog)

Honest journalists like Whitlock are rare. Most print outlets accept Robert's credibility without a second thought. (Apparently, Selena is clubbable).

Even more remarkable, plenty of outlets are running interence for the reporter.

This interview in the Arizona Republic is so fawning and cozy it confirms everything bloggers have ever suspected about the guild mentality of "Professional Journalists Who Have Implicit Credibility Unlike Bloggers Who Cannot Be Trusted To Dig Up The Truth."

Because of Rodriguez's stature, Roberts has become a lightning rod for broadcast commentators and bloggers. Roberts, who left the Star Tribune in 1996 to work at the New York Times and now is a columnist for Sports Illustrated, chatted recently with her old friend, TV critic Neal Justin, from her spot in the eye of the storm.

And here is how her old her old friend Neal Justin starts the hard hitting interview:

Question: There has been some negative stuff out there about you and your credibility. How are you dealing with that?

Selena Roberts: Still lying

Great post by KC Johnson:

The Roberts National Mendacity Tour Continues

The bad news is that she is still out distorting her record on the Duke Lacrosse Hoax. The worse news is that many sports yakkers still hold her up as a credible, level-headed journalist.

The good news is that she is sometimes forced to confront her lacrosse columns as she promotes her A-Rod book.

Every talk show host who gives her airtime should read KC's post and ask the questions she keeps evading.

Some of Selena Roberts's greatest hits can be found here.

What if the mule is too stubborn to pay attention

even after you whack it with a 2x4?

The Duke Lacrosse Hoax was a mighty big whack to the faculty and administration at Duke. Yet, they appear to have learned nothing.

The Group Tightens Its Vise

Who should i believe? Academics or my own lying eyes?

KC Johnson has a new post that reviews several academic papers on the Duke lacrosse case.

A difficult task

I can't say that i am surprised that enterprising "scholars" are devote time and energy to rewriting history. Ideology plays a role, but the main allure is market positioning. It is easier to get attention when your findings seem to contradict conventional wisdom.

I followed the mess down in Durham from the beginning. I blogged about it frequently. Almost all my posts zeroed in on the lies, distortions,and evasions of the press. If Gross and Entman believe that their methodology shows that the media was fair to the falsely accused lacrosse players, then i would suggest that they get another methodology.

Is there any hope for the academy?

Some days i doubt it. This is one of those days. I just finished KC Johnson's review of the latest Duke lacrosse book. His incisive analysis shows once again that too many modern academics spend most of their brainpower avoiding inconvenient facts that are right in front of their eyes.

Review: Race to Injustice

It's the end of the MSM as we know it. Reason 39,751 why i feel fine about it

A journalism profgessor has written a scholarly paper on the Duke lacrosse case. The ideology-addled poseur (Varbara Barnett) argues that Duke was too concerned about due process and ignored the problems of campus rape.

As one who took a close interest in the case from the beginning, i have to ask: what color is the sky in Professor Barnett's world?

KC Johnson, as per usual, has an outstanding analysis.


See also:

Duke lacrosse: auto-de-fe

The Raleigh News and Observer has learned nothing

I've posted a lot on the Duke lacrosse fiasco. many of those posts have focused on the News and Observer whose reporting did much to launch and prolong the hoax.

One might expect the paper to learn their mistakes. They have not. The latest proof is this bizarre post on perp walks.*

Dan Barkin writes:

There is a good chance that the perp being walked today will never see the inside of a prison cell when all is said and done.

The feds know this, in the back of their minds, which may be one big reason for the handcuffs and the cameras. Because even if the accused win in court, they'll still have to live down the images of being perp walked being seen on CNN by everyone who went to high school with them.

The N&O still hates the presumption of innocence when it comes to politically correct defendants. Just like the "privileged white athletes" in the hoax frame, rich white businessmen can never be truly innocent to the N&O. That makes it OK to ruin their reputation before the trial and after an acquittal.

* I first wrote about perp walks long before the lacrosse case. See here.