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Original Post:
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| Duke coverage rehashed |
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| American Journalism Review |
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| Wed, July 18, 2007 |
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Is there anything left to say about the news coverage of the Duke lacrosse case? Stuart Taylor and KC Johnson, the authors of this forthcoming book, hope so. To tide us over before that book's publication in September is this long feature by Rachel Smolkin in the August/September issue of AJR. The nut graf is thoroughly unsurprising, juxtaposing the public shaming and punishment of DA Michael Nifong with the media's unaccountability. Smolkin writes:
But the media deserve a public reckoning, too, a remonstrance for coverage that--albeit with admirable exceptions--all too eagerly embraced the inflammatory statements of a prosecutor in the midst of a tough election campaign. Fueled by Nifong, the media quickly latched onto a narrative too seductive to check: rich, wild, white jocks had brutalized a working class, black mother of two.
I would have worked harder to billboard the story's new facts and conclusions. The problem is, the piece -- while it features some revealing comments by journalists and lawyers involved in the saga -- sheds little new factual light on the case and arrives at the same conclusions that nearly everyone already arrived at months ago: Let's be more skeptical next time. Though well constructed, it could have been told in a more accessible way than simply 7,800 words strung together. A shorter, lessons-learned piece with best and worst examples?
That said, there are some worthwhile highlights:
- The News & Observer's editor, Melanie Sill, on the effect that national competition had on local coverage: "It was a messy story, and the outside media coverage, especially the cable television shows, the presence of every national media outlet here, made it much harder to report," she says. "People we would normally just go interview were having press conferences, or wouldn't talk, or would only talk in a leaking situation."
- Cable talking head Wendy Murphy's dissembling response when asked why she was so gung-ho pro-prosecution: "She notes that she's invited on cable shows to argue for a particular side. 'You have to appreciate my role as a pundit is to draw inferences and make arguments on behalf of the side which I'm assigned,' she says. 'So of course it's going to sound like I'm arguing in favor of "guilty." That's the opposite of what the defense pundit is doing, which is arguing that they're innocent.'" (Has there ever been a clearer argument for the utter show-biz meaninglessness of such "debate" shows?)
- One defense lawyer credits bloggers (not mainstream reporters) with scooping even the defense team by turning up unknown evidence. Johnson's Durham-in-Wonderland blog, says this defense lawyer, was "like having a PhD paralegal." Smolkin cites AJR research for a word count on Johnson's blog as of earlier this month: 800,000 words and counting.
Plus some thoughtful, telling comments by Newsweek's Evan Thomas and the aforementioned Taylor and Johnson.
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Posted at 02:08 PM
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