K.C. Johnson, whose encyclopedic Durham in Wonderland blog kept the nation riveted — and informed — during the Duke lacrosse case debacle, will be in Durham next week to talk about his book on the subject. Johnson, a professor of history at , will speak at 7 p.m. Tuesday at Duke’s Page Auditorium about the case and his book, “Until Proven Innocent,” which he co-wrote with Stuart Taylor.
Meanwhile, in a review of Johnson and Taylor’s book, Duke President Richard Brodhead continues to get bad reviews for his handling of the case:
Richard Brodhead, the president of Duke, condemned the lacrosse players as if they had already been found guilty, demanded the resignation of their coach and studiously ignored the mounting evidence that Ms. Mangum’s charge was false. He was clearly terrified of the racial and gender activists on his own faculty.
The reviewer, Abigail Thernstrom, points to several people who, unlike former DA Mike Nifong, have not paid a price for their shameful behavior during the 15 months the case was alive:
The vitriolic rhetoric of the faculty and Durham’s “progressive” community–including the local chapter of the NAACP–helped to intensify the scandal and stoke the media fires. The New York Times’ coverage was particularly egregious, as Messrs. Taylor and Johnson vividly show. It ran dozens of prominent stories and “analysis” articles trying to plumb the pathologies of the lacrosse players and of a campus culture that allowed swaggering white males to prey on poor, defenseless young black women. As one shrewd Times alumnus later wrote: “You couldn’t invent a story so precisely tuned to the outrage frequency of the modern, metropolitan, bien pensant journalist.” Such Nifong allies–unlike the district attorney himself–paid no price for their shocking indifference to the truth.