Releigh N&O Editor Sill Misstates and Misleads

The McClatchy Company owns the Raleigh News & Observer and sponsors the Editor’s Blog where the N&O’s executive editor for news, Melanie Sill, is supposed to comment and respond to reader’s concerns and questions.

Last evening Sill put up a post which she had to know would misinform and mislead readers regarding the N&O’s biased and inflammatory Duke lacrosse coverage. You can read Sill’s post here.

I decided to respond to a few of her misinforming and misleading statements in the comment below which I’ve just left at the Editor’s Blog.

I’ll soon have more to say about Sill’s post .

Thank you.

John
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Comment from: John [Visitor] • http://www.johnincarolina.com
07/26/06 at 10:11

Dear Melanie:

Your repeated threats to ban me from this blog are harassment, in the face of which some ten weeks or so ago I stopped commenting and questioning here.

But your post is so misleading it demands a response, even if you and the McClatchy Company further harass me.

Here’s an example of your misleading readers. You say:

“Using the word "victim": Readers of The N&O and most print publications, and online for that matter, know that it's common practice to describe people listed as victims in criminal reports as victims. What is unusual in this case isn't that we used that term, but that we and most other media have stopped using it.”

Yes, Melanie, people shot or robbed are listed as victims because they indisputably are.

But as you know, in the case of rape, where the charge and/or actions related to it are denied, ethical news organizations seek to avoid calling the accuser a victim.

That’s because they know that doing so is unfair to the accused who, after all, is presumed innocent, or is at least so presumed by people who respect the Constitution.

What’s more, Melanie, ethical journalists know about the time when newspapers, especially in the South, would cast rape accusers as victims and the accused as their victimizers to “stir the mob” and maybe circulation, too. Often horrific injustices were the result.

That’s why the NY Times, for example, no model of what a newspaper should be, but at least in the case of the Duke lacrosse hoax nothing like the N&O, in every one of its Duke lacrosse stories I’ve read never refers to the accuser as victim, with or without a qualifier such as “reported” or “alleged.”

But you tell trustful N&O readers: “common practice.”

Melanie, I just did a customized search of the N&O’s archives for the period Jan. 1, 2006 to Jan. 31, 2006 using only the input word “rape.”

It yielded many hits. I searched through every one of them to identify those stories that dealt with a rape accusation either in a criminal investigative phase or a judicial pre-adjudication phase.

You know what I found, don’t you, Melanie?

Not one instance in which the N&O called the accuser victim, with or without a conditional qualifier.

In your Mar. 24 story, the one in which you say the N&O “broke” the Duke lacrosse story , the N&O seven times told readers the accuser was the victim or used the possessive “victim’s” when referring to her.

Tell readers the last time the N&O did that in a case involving a rape accusation?

“Common practice?” That’s just false, Melanie.

On Mar. 25 you ran the following headlines on page one, across five columns:

Dancer gives details of ordeal

A woman hired to dance for the Duke lacrosse team describes a night of racial slurs, growing fear and, finally, sexual violence.

The N&O frequently uses quote marks around part or all of a headline to denote it’s an opinion statement, or simply that the N&O has some skepticism about what’s being said. But there are no qualifying quote marks around any of the Mar. 25 headlines.

Those headlines are definitive. They read as facts.

The N&O’s headlines contain no indication of what you knew at the time: That all the players denied the “soft spoken” young mother of two children’s accusations of gang-rape, beating and strangulation.

The N&O explained why it granted the accuser anonymity. You said:

It is The News & Observer's policy not to identify the victims of sex crimes.

That’s clear. No alleged. She’s a victim of “sex crimes.”

You end the Mar. 25 story with:

[Duke Law School Professor Paul] Haagen, a law professor who specializes in sports law, said studies show that violence against women is more prevalent among male athletes than among male students in general -- and higher still among such "helmet sports" as football, hockey and lacrosse.

"These are sports of violence," he said. "This is clearly a concern."

Why did the N&O end what you say was an interview story with those quotes from Haagen?

Did they serve any purpose other than to leave readers with something that would explain to them why a group of “helmet” sport college students committed acts of “violence?”

The research findings Haagen mentioned are, as I’m sure you know, disputed as to their reflecting actual occurrence. They are also based on covariable analysis of incidents of very low frequency.

For those reasons, most researchers and other professionals don’t make the broad, unqualified statements you present Haagen as making. Instead, they very carefully qualify what they say.

They know how such research has been misused in the past to create noxious and false stereotypes of some ethnic and racial groups. They know that such very limited and disputed research is often used even today by people with agendas. Professor Haagan knows that.

Beginning on Mar. 24 and for some time thereafter, the N&O worked with skill and deliberateness to cast the accuser as the victim of a lacrosse team composed of three brutal rapists and their teammates who first stood by as the frightened and tearful young mother was dragged into a bathroom, gang-raped, beaten and strangled; and who then later refused to help dedicated police officers such as Sgt. Mark Gottlieb identify their rapist teammates.

I could say a lot more, Melanie, about other misleading, incomplete or false statements you make in this post and in others but that will no doubt only lead to further harassment.

If you’ll leave this comment up, Melanie, readers taken in by what you’ve said will, I’m confident, reassess and “come out right.”

I enjoy reading the Editor’s Blog. I think readers do a great job here. I hope you stop fussing with them and spend more time answering their questions honestly; also following up on their information, news tips and story leads.

Sincerely,

John
www.johnincarolina.com

PS – Remember those story tips I gave you about Raleigh’s National Championship High School Quiz Bowl team and the NC State Professor whose annotated summer reading list was chosen by Business Week as one of its “recommended” summer reading lists?

You said those folks would be contacted. They weren’t. How come?

We can’t help the N&O unless you let us.