KC Johnson points out in his blogging today subsequent to the Duke lacrosse rape case hearing that The Herald-Sun was named as one of the factors requiring a change of venue. Forgive me for engaging in a bit of schadenfreude, but I can’t help it. Not to blow my own horn or that of the previous Herald-Sun regime (well, fine, maybe I will) but I can’t imagine that the paper’s previous leadership (Dave Hughey, Bill Hawkins, me) would have allowed ourselves to come to this pass.
I have no doubt that we would have, from the very beginning, seen the problems with this case. I say “from the beginning” because most media that now see the problems, including The N&O, on the news side and on the opinion side, did not see them early on, so blinded were they by the race-class-gender aspects of the case. Given the way we approached news and the way our newsroom culture was anti-political correctness, there is no way The Herald-Sun would be the national embarrassment it is today if Paxton were not in control.
UPDATE: John in Carolina pointed out in an email that I left former Editorial Page Editor Bob Wilson off the list above (he got the axe with the rest of us). I certainly didn’t mean to. I was thinking mainly of the news side, not editorials. But I can assure you that Bob’s editorial pages would have been much different on the lacrosse case than the current H-S edit pages.
