Duke Case: a Lesson for the Media
After a year of saturation coverage of the case by the media, three white former Duke University lacrosse players were cleared Wednesday of charges they kidnapped and sexually assaulted a black woman who claimed they attacked her at a team party 13 months ago.
At an afternoon press conference in Raleigh, N.C., state Attorney General Roy Cooper said that the young men–Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty, and David Evans–were victims of both an unchecked prosecutor now facing an ethics investigation into his handling of the case and an unreliable accuser who "told many stories" that were inconsistent and contradicted by evidence.
"We believe these three individuals are innocent of these charges," said Cooper, whose office took over the case three months ago. "There is insufficient evidence to proceed on any of the charges. These cases are over." Rape charges against the three had been dropped in December for lack of evidence.
Charges won't be pursued against the accuser, who, Cooper said, may actually believe the many different stories she has been telling.
It was a stunning end to a saga that began March 13, 2006, at an off-campus house party where a woman hired to perform as a stripper claimed she was beaten, raped, and sodomized by the three men. The incendiary accusations and elements of race and class attracted a frenzy of national media coverage.
Reporters hungrily relayed to audiences and readers District Attorney Mike Nifong's assertions–from calling team members a "bunch of hooligans" to his suggestion that he had evidence to proceed even after DNA tests failed to link any of the players to the accuser. The Los Angeles Times wrote about how the accusations reinforced a "sense that college sports are out of control," and Rolling Stone published "Sex and Scandal at Duke."
The men's lacrosse season was suspended, the coach resigned, the accused players went home, and Nifong won the Democratic primary and fall general election. And the 24-hour news cycle was sated.
So who failed the three young men, who now begin the business of salvaging their reputations in a Google-search-driven world, where the false charges will cling to them like lint for the rest of their lives? It's easy to lay the blame at the feet of Nifong, who Cooper said engaged in a "tragic rush to accuse and a failure to verify serious allegations."
But the media, too, bear some responsibility. Tom Rosenstiel of the Project for Excellence in Journalism says that reporters in this age of instantaneous communication have an obligation to be cautious, be skeptical, and "not get used."
With the 24-hour news cycle, Rosenstiel says, he has seen the old model of "journalism of verification being overrun by journalism of assertion," where allegations go directly to the public without the vetting and checking that occurred more routinely in the past.
Assertion journalism, he says, gives outsize power to a runaway source– someone like Nifong, whom Cooper described as "unchecked." All of that played out on the Duke campus last year; some of it was good for business–cable audiences spiked when programs like that hosted by Nancy Grace on Headline News made the scandal almost nightly fodder.
(On Wednesday, Grace, an outspoken victims' advocate, told U.S. News that if prosecutors believe the accuser lied, "a charge of false reporting is appropriate. This is their duty, to pursue the evidence and reach an outcome that speaks the truth.")
The good news, Rosenstiel says, is that truth is pretty durable, and over time, "even when the media isn't at its best, the truth will come out."
"One can judge how well the media does by how long it takes to get to the truth."
For the three exonerated players, it was about 12 months overdue.
"It's been a long year," Evans said at a press conference held by all three after the announcement. "I hope these allegations don't come to define me."
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