Hoax commentary – 4/16/2007

Readers Note: I’ve a transient medical situation the docs say will get better sooner if I stay prone most of the time.

So blogging will be light for a few days. But I’m reading and thinking a lot; and in order to “keep the blog light burning” I’ll post for the next few days some informal commentary posts without the usual links to sources. That will be a time saver and allow me to prattle on as if I were a “distinguished journalist and pundit.”

John
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I thought last night’s 60 Minutes episode was a big plus for all involved: the players, Cooper and Stahl.

On another matter: The N&O has now given us a second and very different account of what took place at the “anonymous interview.” (really two sessions on the same day according to the N&O’s “latest”)

Don’t you think it’s fittingly ironic that Mangum told a number of conflicting stories and now the N&O is compelled to admit it told conflicting stories about its “anonymous interview” with her?

Why did the N&O give us such a false account in its March 25 “anonymous interview” story?

I still don’t have a satisfactory answer to that question, not to my own personal satisfaction, and certainly not to any level of confidence where I'd put it on the blog.

One thing I’m sure of: the answer to the question isn’t, “Samiha Khanna did it. She wrote the story.”

Young reporters dream of page one, above the fold, five column wide stories that are sure to “go national.”

But they don’t decide to put the stories there. Editors do that. And editors have the final call on what goes in a story.

I’m working on a post that will say more about that. Also, that the story had two reporters’ names bylined. The other was Anne Blythe.

Blythe and Khanna teamed, you’ll recall, on the first of the N&O’s framing stories that ran on March 24 and seven times called Mangum the “victim.”

Some people are talking about apologies. I predict the N&O will very soon offer a “Nifong-type” apology or claim it already has.

Did you all read N&O exec editor Melanie Sill and public editor Ted Vaden’s columns’ in the April 15 edition? They blamed the players and their parents for the N&O's false and racially inflammatory coverage last March and April.

Do any of you really believe I’m too critical of the N&O?

I’ll give you my answer: I spent a lot of today flat on my back but able to at least scroll a laptop and read many of my posts from last year on the Hoax.

A date was wrong here or there, and there were spelling errors, but the posts have stood up to time and unfolding events.

If anything, I was too cautious and understating in my posts regarding the N&O’s important role in launching and maintaining the frame-up.

The next time someone tells you how good the N&O’s coverage got after last April, ask that person a question if you think the person is intelligent and reasonable: Would the Nifong part of the frame-up have gone as far as it did and caused all the damage we know its caused, if last May when David Evans was indicted or last June when Duke Law professor James Coleman called for Nifong to remove himself from the case, the N&O had shared with us the critical information it withheld from us about what the frightened young mother, “struggling not to cry as she recounted the events,” really said?

My favorite person has just said I need to get prone.

I’ll be in touch again soon.

(This unproofed)