http://www.nypost.com/seven/01212007/tv/fe...il_mushnick.htm
FESTERING ISSUES IN DUKE LACROSSE CASE
By PHIL MUSHNICK
January 21, 2007 -- On one hand, "60 Minutes" lately has done an admirable and thorough job, devoting two full segments to the wishful-thinking American justice system that left three Duke lacrosse players indicted for rape.
On the other hand, what took it so long? "60 Minutes" could've reached many of the same conclusions 10 months ago, when the charges against the students were first made.
And where's everyone else in the news media who rashly fueled an episode of mob and racial injustice, so reminiscent of what American blacks suffered for decades?
If the news media is disinclined to step forward to admit that it prompted erroneous and dangerous conclusions -- white people doing dirt to black people, yet again! -- why hasn't the case's evisceration been given the same blaring treatment as when the NAACP rallies were held? Or when a Duke professor called for the entire lacrosse team to be expelled in order to rid the school of the "drunken white male privilege loosed among us," and when the indictments were issued?
The news media, in this pathetic case of abandoning justice to pander to every sensibility except justice, was as guilty as Durham County D.A. Mike Nifong, the desperate fellow who needed Raleigh's African-American vote to get reelected, even if it meant sending innocent people to prison. The media, always gutless in affairs that become immersed in race, essentially fanned imaginary flames after the first cries of "Fire!"
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http://www.timesdaily.com/apps/pbcs.dll/ar.../-1/COMMUNITIES
Article published Jan 21, 2007
The making of a social disaster
The question posed by the title of a newspaper advertisement taken out by 88 Duke professors after allegations of a black woman being raped by three white members of the university's lacrosse team was this: What does a social disaster look like?
I will give you one possible answer. It looks like a bunch of academics making wildly incendiary remarks at the top of their lungs about racism and sexism on campus at a time when a sense of fair play and decency would advise you to speak dispassionately, and very carefully.
The advertisement may have fallen short of a mob in the streets, rope in hand, marching to lynch the accused -- but not by as much as you would hope. The implication that a rape certainly occurred and that racist whites were responsible was everywhere to be sniffed out, and that was just the beginning: There was a sense of incitement throughout the harangue.
It talked of many students who "know themselves to be objects of racism and sexism'' and "see illumined in this moment's extraordinary spotlight what they live with every day'' -- an ever-present danger of racial mayhem, one would guess, though no evidence is supplied.
It spoke of students "shouting and whispering about what happened to this young woman and to themselves.'' Anonymous students then quoted in the ad mostly address white insensitivity to their concerns, but also "terror.'' One quote says "what has happened is a disaster,'' and the professors jump in again: "The students know this disaster didn't begin on March 13th (the date a stripper said she was the subject of sexual assault at a lacrosse team party) and won't end with what the police say or the court decides.''
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