Ten months ago today, the Raleigh News & Observer "broke" the Hoax story. ("DNA tests ordered for Duke athletes. Lacrosse team reports to lab in rape inquiry," Mar. 24)
The N&O's story makes no mention of Durham DA Mike Nifong who didn't begin speaking publicly about the case until Mar. 27.
But if you read the N&O's story and the rest of this post, you'll see the N&O was already on Mar. 24 telling readers the woman was "the victim" and framing the lacrosse players as her victimizers. The N&O would continue for weeks relantlessly and shamelessly framing the Duke lacrosse players.
When Nifong began speaking publicly about the case he knew he had only to recall and restate what the N&O was already telling the public and the rest of media.
The N&O is the largest and most influential news organization in the Duke/Durham area.
What follows is from a June 12 JinC post: "Duke lacrosse: Look at the first newspaper report"
Melanie Sill, the Raleigh News & Observer’s executive editor for news, has done a lot of cluck-clucking about how The N&O “broke the story” we’ve all come to call the Duke lacrosse case. And she's right about that.
Now let’s take a look at how, on Mar 24, the N&O broke the story under the headlines:
DNA tests ordered for Duke athletesThe N&O began:
Lacrosse team reports to lab in rape inquiry
Durham police had 46 members of the Duke University lacrosse team DNA-tested Thursday in the suspected gang-rape of a woman at an off-campus party last week.As the story moves along, you notice statements like:
Police think at least three of the men could be responsible for the sexual assault, beating, robbery and near-strangulation of one of two women who had an appointment to dance at the party March 13, according to a search warrant.
A search warrant returned Thursday details the attack the victim described to police.But the search warrant didn’t detail “the attack the victim described.”
The search warrant only contained details the accuser gave police about an alleged attack.
Why didn't the N&O tell readers that? And “victim?” Where did that come from, you ask?
The N&O explained:
It is The News & Observer's policy not to identify victims of reported sex crimes.The N&O didn’t say how it knows someone reporting a sex crime is a victim; or whether it just goes ahead and grants victim status and anonymity to anyone reporting what the person says was a sex crime.
But regardless of how The N&O decides such things, the effect of its granting victim status to the accuser was to frame the Duke lacrosse players as the victimizers.
The N&O did that before its readers were even halfway through the very first story they’d read on the Duke lacrosse case.
The N&O went on to say such things as:
” The victim was pulled into a bathroom, and three men held her down, sexually assaulting and sodomizing her, the warrant says. She was kicked, hit, strangled and beaten, she told police.”The N&O worked very hard to get “victim” fixed in readers’ minds.
and
“They also looked for artificial fingernails painted with red polish, apparently lost in the victim's struggle.
All told the N&O referred in its story to the accuser as “the victim” or used the possessive “victim’s” a total of 7 times.
Why did The N&O work so hard to present the accuser as a victim? What did the N&O know that justified doing that?
The N&O’s public editor, Ted Vaden,told me in a phone conversation he wouldn't answer that question because: “Frankly, John, there isn’t time to answer every question someone asks, and I’m not going to answer that one.”
If Vaden had answered my question I'd have gone on and asked him whether anyone at the N&O or the McClatchy Company, its owner, ever considered how casting the accuser as “the victim” was framing the Duke lacrosse players?
Here's something else we should all be asking: Why didn’t the N&O tell its readers that the three lacrosse players who rented the house where the accuser said she was gang-raped voluntarily gave statements to the police without counsels present; voluntarily went to Duke Medical Center and submitted to “rape kit” tests; and offered to take lie detector tests?
That all happened days before the N&O broke the story.
It belonged in the story, didn't it?
When you look at the N&O’s “we broke it” story, it’s not hard to understand why the story played out for months the way it did; and why so many decent people were fooled.
But that doesn’t explain why the N&O ran the kind of story it did.
4 comments:
Thank goodness, the adults at the N&O finally took over and Joe Neff and Benjamin Niolet began to deal with the real story. But until the N&O fesses up to what it did, there will be an astrik by its coverage.
John, I know this is going to sound very harsh and not at all compassionate, but I must remark on your last sentence.
While I grant that a lot of decent people were fooled, I cannot believe that the decent people who were fooled were also intelligent. I don't live within 1000 miles of Durham and I could smell something rotten from here on day one or two.
I would grant that many people of good conscience may have been fooled, but I must think the caveat "decent but dumb".
I'm sorry for how harsh I sound, but I have little sympathy for abandonment of principle in favor of emotion or for self-inflicted stupidity.
If even those fooled had adhered to the principles of law and reason we all espouse, the lives of so many would not have been derailed. It is a failure of duty of citizenry to not follow reason and rule of law because we become emotionally incensed at the seriousness of the accusation. If accusation is the standard by which we live, we can do away with the courts, and trials, and investigations. Which is very nearly what happened here because so many failed their duty as citizens. Most unintentionally,as an exercise in nonvigilance, and a few intentionally such as Nifong and Sill et al.
Harsh but not wrong.
Neff deserves credit, but his work doesn't make up for the incredible lapses by the N&O in late March. Melanie Sill will perhaps get a chance in court to explain.
Bust 'em John. I'm with you on this...
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