OK, I’ve been to dinner and will use this post to empty my notebook from today’s panel on the Duke lacrosse rape allegations.
The early part of the session was spent discussing how a local crime story morphed into a national sensation. Everyone agreed that the “perfect storm” of race, gender and class came together to entice the national media from the media capitals. As a result, there followed several weeks of “parachute” journalism, in which national correspondents swooped into Durham to get a piece of the story.
That sometimes had absurd consequences. Seyward Darby, who was the Duke Chronicle editor at the time of the incident, was critical of the media visitors from out of town. “We’d watch the national news and they’d say something and we’d look at each other and say, ‘That’s not the case at all.'” When visiting news crews asked her about Duke’s allegedly divided campus, “I told them that the only thing dividing the campus was their powerlines.”
ESPN’s Jay Bilas, a 1986 Duke grad who got his law degree in 1992, criticized the opinion portions of the 24-hour news channels for spreading many of the untruths about Duke and race relations in Durham. “I was on [a show] with a reporter from Detroit who was commenting on the racial tension in Durham,” he said. What could she know about racial tension in Durham? he asked. The reporter also referred to a “pattern of misbehaviour on the lacrosse team,” Bilas said, but could give no examples of such behaviour when pressed.
Bilas and fellow panelist James E. Coleman, Jr., a Duke law professor and chairman of the committee that examined the lacrosse program last spring and summer, agreed that had it not been for Durham DA Mike Nifong’s many press conferences early on, the story would not have metastasized as it did. Coleman pointed to the many things Nifong said “that were factually not true,” such as the “wall of silence” among players, the gang rape that never occurred, etc.
An interesting moment came when one questioner in the audience said he was “surprised by the joviality and light-heartedness” of the discussion. “Do any of you hold yourselves accountable as reporters that so many lives have been ruined?” he asked. The consensus seemed to be that, yes, they worry about it, but that they can’t do much about it when people are charged who might later turn out to be innocent. Jerrold Footlick, a former Newsweek editor and now a consultant, said he was optimistic. “If they’re acquitted, their lives are not ruined.”
Another questioner wondered if the media would focus on prosecutorial misconduct as much as it focused on the initial charges now that much more is known about the initial investigation and misinformation from the DA. The N&O‘s John Drescher said his paper has been very aggressive following up on those leads. This prompted one audience member to yell: “I haven’t seen Nifong’s mug shot on the cover of a magazine yet.” A round of applause followed that remark.
Earlier in the session, Newsweek‘s Susannah Meadows said when she first heard that the players had voluntarily submitted to DNA tests without lawyers present she felt that was a sign they could be innocent. Coleman cautioned reporters against that reaction, asking Meadows if she would have assumed they were guilty if they had brought lawyers with them. He then criticized Nifong for the DA’s comments on ESPN that if the players were innocent why were they hiring lawyers.
UPDATE: For a good list of blogs and Web sites covering the Duke case, go to Durham In Wonderland, K.C. Johnson’s fine blog, and check out his blogroll. You might also want to check out William L. Anderson’s columns on the subject.
