Duke lacrosse: Taking terrible and making it worse

On March 24 the Raleigh News & Observer broke the story we’ve come to call the Duke lacrosse case.

The following day The N&O’s front page carried a five-column, above the fold headline

DANCER GIVES DETAILS OF ORDEAL

The subheadline

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

The story began:

The woman who says she was raped last week by three members of the Duke University lacrosse team thought she would be dancing for five men at a bachelor party, she said Friday. But when she arrived that night, she found herself surrounded by more than 40.

Just moments after she and another exotic dancer started to perform, she said, men in the house started barking racial slurs. The two women, both black, stopped dancing.

"We started to cry," she said. "We were so scared."

Forty-six members of the men's lacrosse team submitted DNA samples Thursday in the unusual case. As of late Friday, there had been no arrests. Duke officials briefed university staff Friday on the allegations, and authorities vowed to crack the team's wall of solidarity.

"We're asking someone from the lacrosse team to step forward," Durham police Cpl. David Addison said. "We will be relentless in finding out who committed this crime." […]

Looking back now you may wonder why The N&O’s headlines provided no qualifications of any sort regarding what the dancer said happened that night?

Why did The N&O just headline that the woman had described a night of racial slurs, growing fear and, finally, sexual violence in the same way a paper might headline a new publisher’s plans for the paper?

But many decent people, prepped by the headlines, very likely put those questions aside as they felt great sympathy reading how the women, exposed to the "barking of racial slurs," “started to cry” and “were so scared.”

And once they learned police Cpl. David Addison had vowed, “We will be relentless in finding out who committed this crime,” they reacted as most decent citizens do.

They wanted to help the officer put those criminals behind bars, damn it!

That’s how, I believe, a lot of otherwise decent people began to adopt a “vigilante mentality” they now regret.

But what if somewhere in The N&O's first five paragraphs it told readers the three Duke lacrosse players who rented the house where the party was held had all voluntarily given statements to the police and had offered to take lie detector tests?

What if along with "authorities vowed to crack the team's wall of solidarity" The N&O had said something about players acting on advice of counsel who were seeking to meet with the DA and provide him information?

If people knew some of that it would have made a big difference in how people began to think about the story.

In fact it would have made a difference if The N&O had told readers any of those facts anywhere in its more than one thousand word March 25 story.

The police and District Attorney Mike Nifong knew all that information and much more about efforts the lacrosse players had made to cooperate with them.

Why didn’t The N&O tell readers about any of it? Did The N&O not know about that information?

The N&O didn’t report in its first Duke lacrosse story March 24 anything concerning cooperation by the Duke players beyond them submitting as ordered for DNA testing. Perhaps a deadline or something else prevented The N&O from informing readers.

But surely if The N&O knew that information, it should have told readers about it in its March 25 page one, headline story.

I hope readers ask The N&O’s public editor, Ted Vaden, about the questions I’ve raised here.

You can contact him at: ted.vaden@newsobserver.com

In a day or so I’ll post further on how I think The N&O’s March 24 and 25 stories helped make a terrible situation worse, including more dangerous.
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URLs March 24: http://www.newsobserver.com/742/story/421494.html

March 25: http://www.newsobserver.com/102/v-print/story/421799.html