Duke Lacrosse Lament

- Media Notes Extra - washingtonpost.com: "...But in all the coverage you read and see about the clearing of these young men, very little of it will be devoted to the media's role in ruining their lives. I didn't hear a single television analyst mention it yesterday, even though two of the players' lawyers took shots at the press...

...We will now read 100 stories about how an obsessive prosecutor overreached in bringing the indictments in the first place, and that's fine. But keep in mind that the Duke case was all over the network newscasts, the morning shows, the cable channels and the front pages. Newsweek put two of the defendants' mug shots on the cover. "I'm so glad they didn't miss a lacrosse game over a little thing like gang rape," Nancy Grace said on Headline News...

...The North Carolina AG spoke of "a tragic rush to accuse," and he just as easily could have been talking about journalists as Mike Nifong. Commentators have been chattering about whether Nifong will be disbarred, but no one gets to disbar the media.

What made this a case of aggravated media assault is that news outlets weren't content to focus on the three defendants. Attorney General Roy Cooper said there was a "rush to condemn a community and a state." Remember all the "trend" stories about "pampered" and "privileged" student athletes being "out of control"? Remember how the lacrosse players' homes were shown on TV? How the coach lost his job? How this case was depicted as being about the contrast between a white elite institution and a poor black community? All of that was built on what turned out to be lies..."

I have looked all over Left Blogistan and have yet to find one note of contrition concerning this "high-tech lynching." Rich white boys can be victims, too, and this time they were and no amount of excusing will change the fact that too many people who ought to know better, since we all spend a lot of time looking at blogs and separating wheat from chaff, jumped far, far over the conclusion line. Basically, it was accusation to gas chamber in six seconds flat, ignoring the dozens of red flags waving in the gale of info from this case.

You'd think people who weren't fooled by tales of yellow cake uranium wouldn't fall for the half-baked incoherencies that came out the rape investigation within the first 48 hours. But they did. And apparently no one wants to own up to it.