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August 30, 2006
Incroyable
Imagine you were an idiot and imagine you were a member of Congress...
OK, so that's been said before. Now imagine you were a major metropolitan newspaper and you were still flogging an inflammatory lede most reputable papers had backed away from weeks ago...
No. Not Joe Wilson's pack o' lies. This one:
Imagine you are the world's most powerful newspaper and you have invested your credibility in yet another story line that is falling apart, crumbling as inexorably as Jayson Blair's fabrications and the flawed reporting on Saddam Hussein's supposed WMD. What to do?If you're the New York Times and the story is the alleged gang rape of a black woman by three white Duke lacrosse players—a claim shown by mounting evidence to be almost certainly fraudulent—you tone down your rhetoric while doing your utmost to prop up a case that's been almost wholly driven by prosecutorial and police misconduct.
And by bad journalism. Worse, perhaps, than the other recent Times embarrassments. The Times still seems bent on advancing its race-sex-class ideological agenda, even at the cost of ruining the lives of three young men who it has reason to know are very probably innocent. This at a time when many other true believers in the rape charge, such as feminist law professor Susan Estrich, have at last seen through the prosecution's fog of lies and distortions.
But the Times continues to fiddle while Rome is burning, blithely elevating the uncorroborated testimony of a single police officer who took no notes over copious medical evidence that contradicts his undocumented recollections and omitting any facts that contradict the conclusion it obviously wishes to draw: something is dangerously rotten in the state of North Carolina.
Read it. Read it all.
Posted by Cassandra at August 30, 2006 12:44 PM