Virginian Pilot on "Duke Non-Rape" Case: It's All "Their" Fault!

My wife handed me that part of the Sunday Virginian Pilot that I usually scan: the comics and the editorial page. I read the editorial page because it’s a useful guide. There are two kinds of guides that are useful: one who consistently point you in the right direction and one who consistently points you in the wrong direction. Both are equally useful once you figure out which is which. The Pilot is an infallible guide. If you read its advice and do the exact opposite, you are sure to get it right.

Where was I? Oh yes. The Pilot felt compelled to editorialize A hard lesson on snap judgment on the apology extended to the falsely accused lacrosse players by Duke President Richard Brodhead. Why? Who knows? The Pilot’s sparse coverage of events outside of Tidewater consists of reprints of wire service stories and NY Times articles.

Since I have followed this story closely, and since there is a wealth of information on a web site devoted to this case created by professor K.C. Johnson Durham-in-Wonderland, at least three things about this editorial proved to me again that the Pilot is an infallible guide to wrongness.

First, the Pilot’s editors ascribe what they call the “rush to judgment” one of their favorite villains: “shock radio and endlessly blathering blogs.” This attempt to lie about the past may have fooled people twenty years ago when inconvenient facts could be swept down the “memory hole” but today there are alternative sources of information. Thanks to the magic of computers and the Internet, we can find out who said what and when about this case. And it wasn’t shock radio and blogs that were piling on the lacrosse players. It was a lynch mob led by

-Duke’s professors (the Duke 88)
-the NAACP
-and the high and mighty New York Times – the source of much of the Pilot’s news and opinion.

Lest we forget, it was the New York Times that sent a pair of investigative reporters to Durham to review the evidence AFTER the DNA came back negative for the accused and pronounced:

By disclosing pieces of evidence favorable to the defendants, the defense has created an image of a case heading for the rocks. But an examination of the entire 1,850 pages of evidence gathered by the prosecution in the four months after the accusation yields a more ambiguous picture. It shows that while there are big weaknesses in Mr. Nifong’s case, there is also a body of evidence to support his decision to take the matter to a jury.

Stuart Taylor takes them apart in Slate where he states:

The Times took its stand in a 5,600-word, Page One reassessment of the case on Aug. 25, written by Duff Wilson, a sportswriter responsible for much of the paper's previous one-sided coverage, and Jonathan Glater. The headline was "Files From Duke Rape Case Give Details But No Answers."

Like the headline, the piece cultivates a meretricious appearance of balance. But its flaws are so glaring that it was shredded by bloggers within hours after it hit my doorstep. They were led by a Durham group called Liestoppers and by KC Johnson, an obscure but brilliant New York City history professor of centrist political views. Johnson alone has produced more insightful (if sometimes one-sided) analysis and commentary on the Duke case—about 60,000 words—than all the nation's newspapers combined.

The Wilson-Glater piece highlights every superficially incriminating piece of evidence in the case, selectively omits important exculpatory evidence, and reports hotly disputed statements by not-very-credible police officers and the mentally unstable accuser as if they were established facts. With comical credulity, it features as its centerpiece a leaked, transparently contrived, 33-page police sergeant's memo that seeks to paper over some of the most obvious holes in the prosecution's evidence.

I have written about this here.

While virtually all the MSM went with the lie, I cite the New York Times because it is the big cahuna of dead tree publishing, and there are too many other villains in this story to mention. So, contrary to the Pilot’s desire to shift the blame to radio commentators (read Rush Limbaugh) or the blogosphere, it was the so-called “mainstream media” that carried the story and rushed to judgment.

And why not? It had the appropriate victim: a black female (a twofer) and the appropriate villains: rich white males. Given the ideological make-up of media types, the story was too good not to be true.

And when the story blew up in their faces, they decided to point fingers and cry “foul.” “We were misled,” they cried. The fact is they wanted the story to be true so when the DNA evidence wasn’t there, when photographic evidence showed that one of the accused was not at the party at the time of the supposed rape, they kept on keeping on. They were not misled; they were willing accomplices in a high tech lynching, and not for the first time.

And lest we forget about the NAACP, here's the reaction to the exculpatory DNA evidence:

Bruce DePyssler, an assistant professor of English at Central and faculty advisor to the "The Campus Echo," said reaction on the Central campus to the DNA news was a little disorienting. "Our initial reaction was 'uh-Oh, this is another Tawana Brawley.' However there were more students who thought there was more of a conspiracy and that the DNA tests don't prove anything," DePyssler said.

Barber [North Carolina NAACP President]says he has been focused on tamping down talk among some black residents of "taking matters into our own hands." No vigilante justice has been Barber's bottom-line message. But, he said, the NAACP is demanding a thorough investigation.

And here is one of the bloggers that the Pilot's editors may have been talking about.
And here is NOW's view. Are these the blogs the Pilot's editors are reading? Sad to say, that may be exactly where they get their news.

Not content with re-writing history, the Pilot then attempts to turn a wrong into a right.

When the Duke players were charged, Brodhead acted by canceling the men's lacrosse season, ushering the team's coach out the door and instituting a series of reviews involving "campus culture," the interaction of the university and the Durham community, and reports of "persistent problems" with the lacrosse team.

Given the explosive nature of the events, and the glimpses of laxness in team oversight, those actions stand the test of time.

Oh yeah? I call bullshit. If the accusation of rape by a college football or basketball player resulted in the cancellation of the season and the firing of the coach there would not be an athletic program in any college in the nation. The fact is that the poisonous racial atmosphere engendered by radical professors at Duke, the Durham NAACP and egged on by Liberal newspapers led to the destruction of the lacrosse program at Duke and the establishment of kangaroo courts headed by the very professors who were stoking the fires of racial hatred.

And finally, Brodhead’s apology is totally inadequate because it does not address the problems created by tenured radicals in the university which led the lynch mob that – but for a good team of defense attorneys – would have led to the destruction of the lives of three completely innocent men as the racists bigots in Durham, the media and the academy cheered.

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