This just in...
http://media.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YWFmNDIyYmM1NjY5ODRlYTA1ZGYxNWI4MTE3MDBjNWY=
After NYT's Shoddy Duke Reporting, Anderson is Becoming "A Believer"
10/09 03:51 PM - The Markup
Via Romenesko, New York columnist Kurt Anderson writes that the New York Times's coverage of the Duke lacrosse team rape case has caused him to revisit his attitudes toward the mainstream media and bloggers:
... real facts are stubborn things. And today, the preponderance of facts indicate that there is an injustice—committed, as it turns out, against those perfect offenders. Yet at the epicenter of bien-pensant journalism, the New York Times, reporters and editors—although pointedly not the paper’s columnists—are declining to expose it. “The only thing we can look forward to now,” says Dan Okrent, who was the Times’ ombudsman until last year, “is what the Times will say to the accused once the charges are dropped, or once acquittals are delivered.” [...]
“I’ve never been a source for anyone on any story ever written about the Times,” one reporter at the paper told me. So why on this one? “I’ve never felt so ill over Times coverage.” That’s ill at a paper that published Jayson Blair’s fabrications and Judy Miller on WMD. “It’s institutional,” said one of the several editors to whom I spoke. “You see it again and again, the way the Times lumbers into trouble.” [...]
In the movie, Tom Hanks would play K. C. Johnson. He’s the most impressive of the “bloggers who have closely followed the case,” in the Times’ tacitly pejorative construction. But Johnson is the Platonic ideal of the species—passionate but committed to rigor and facts and fairness, a tenured professor of U.S. history (at Brooklyn College), a 38-year-old vegetarian who lives alone in a one-bedroom Bay Ridge apartment and does pretty much nothing but study, teach, run, and write. [...]
... For the past few years, I’ve tended to roll my eyes when people default to rants about the blindered oafishness or various biases of “the mainstream media” in general and the Times in particular. At the same time, I’ve nodded when people gush about the blogosphere as a valuable check on and supplement to the MSM—but I’ve never entirely bought it. Having waded deep into this Duke mess the last weeks, baffled by the Times’ pose of objectivity and indispensably guided by Johnson’s blog, I’m becoming a believer.
Welcome to the party, Kurt. NR's Anthony Dick wrote a great piece on the passions driving the Duke lacrosse story, available to NRD subscribers here. You can read K.C. Johnson's blog here.
I posted this on another thread, and the fact that NRO and others are running with it adds weight:
The 60 Minutes segment coming up must be pretty explosive. The reason this is so is we have had revelations in the last few days regarding the line ups, the FA history of flipping out in public when drinking, the FA continuing to accuse Kim Roberts stealing/participating in the rape long after March 13/14 (which is the tidbit the N&O refused to publish), and the New York Times story that are just more nails in the coffin for Nifong. There will be more, but there is no reason for this information to come out now. We are in a lull in hearings and motions, and these leaks have all the hallmarks of CYA so that when 60 minutes broadcasts some folks who screwed the pooch back since March can have cover stories. Just a theory but there is a reason all these leaks are suddenly occuring.
And now Duke is forming panels to discuss the issues. Too bad they did not do this months ago when it would have mattered, but add another party trying to CYA.