Duke's Trial by Media
Why the seamy lacrosse scandal may be too hot to be true
When her phone rang that last day of spring semester, Duke University junior Emily Rotberg didn't appreciate the 7 a.m. wake-up. Until her colleague from the Chronicle student newspaper told her what he'd just heard about the story they had been chasing for seven weeks: The black stripper who had accused three white Duke lacrosse players of raping her at a team party had made a similar--and unsubstantiated--claim against three men a decade earlier.
The news came on the heels of state crime lab results that failed to match any of the DNA samples from 46 team members with those taken from the woman in the hours after the alleged attack on March 13. All that quickly put the media horde following the case in a quandary. Did the story line many were pursuing--that a toxic collision of race, class, and alcohol had resulted in gang sexual violence--still hold up? Or were the accusations a pack of lies--or something in between?
Deeper. "That was the moment I realized that the story was going to be a lot ... deeper than anyone anticipated," Rotberg said recently. "This is a story that went from soap opera black-and-white to uncertain gray very quickly."
Everyone in the media--not just the tabloids and not just the talk show screamers--got a shot at writing a scene in this morality play. Early finger-waggers included the Los Angeles Times: "Duke lacrosse scandal reinforces a growing sense that college sports are out of control, fueled by pampered athletes with a sense of entitlement." Rolling Stone ran with "Sex and Scandal at Duke," detailing a "booze-fueled culture of the never-ending hookup." Affronted opiners like New York Times columnist David Brooks weighed in. The case is a witch hunt, he said, blaming the atmosphere on the "tenured left."
Whoever's to blame, lacrosse players Collin Finnerty, Reade Seligmann, and David Evans (who has since graduated) face trial next spring on charges of kidnapping and first-degree rape and sexual offense. And though Duke's Durham, N.C., campus is much quieter now that reporters and satellite trucks have moved on, students returning to classes late this month will find their campus till haunted by both the allegations and the accompanying press firestorm. That firestorm provided an uncomfortable glimpse at how tshe media's voracious appetite for scoops, Internet hits, and ratings can quickly reduce a complicated story--and a campus like Duke's--to caricature.
"We're in a world now where the tail wags the dog in terms of the most sensationalistic media leading the more respectable media," says Clarence Page, a Chicago Tribune columnist whose book Showing My Color explored issues of race.
Indeed, many early accounts stoked the image of the lacrosse team as a swaggering pack of white, privileged beer drinkers with a string of misdemeanor charges, and the accuser as a hard-working state college student stripping to stay in school and support her two children. Those images fed the journalistic convention that news is drama and drama is conflict--the simple calculation required to stitch together a cohesive narrative in time for a fast-approaching deadline. Nuance is, almost necessarily, a casualty, and accuracy a frequent victim.
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