His behaviour was criminal - or should be.
His behavior was transparently unethical. Actually, he slandered the entire Duke Lacrosse Team by publicly accusing them, falsely, of sonewalling ("a blue wall of silence").But we all know that the actual exploiters of the Duke Lacrosse Team were others who picked up on the gambit, and ran with it. The Duke 88, for example. But the real deep pockets exploiters were in the propaganda (so-called "objective") media. Just as in the case of the 60 Minutes "Killian Memos" October surprise hit on President Bush - and as in the case of the post-election commentary on Fox News Channel's calling the '00 election for Bush in the wee hours after the election, Big Journalism systematically promotes itself at the expense of others. Its claim of objectivity is a fraud, and that fraud makes all other frauds it perpetrates doubly - no, trebly as in "triple damages for RICO" - egregious.
The proper target of the legitimate lawsuit which should lie in all these cases is not just an individual like Nifong but broadcast journalism and the FCC for licensing broadcasters and allowing them to pull these stunts with impunity.
Any politician can choose not to appear on FNC or any other venue which doesn't float their boat. But it certainly speaks volumes about the relative clout of FNC and ABC (et. al.) that the Democratic candidates feel entirely free to dis Fox in a way that it would never occur to a Republican candidate to dis ABC.The planted axiom of the choice of the Democrats to dis FNC is that ABC et. al. are objective. Indeed, that axiom is planted in the entire FCC broadcast licensing scheme - and more-or-less explicit in McCain-Feingold. It is also embedded in the "Fairness Doctrine" which the Democrats are determined to resurrect, precisely to suppress the open discussion of politics.
Democrats oppose the open expression of political opinion because they reject the idea of the possibility of their own fallibility. That is not an unprecedented position for people to take - otherwise it would not have a name handed down to us by history. The name for that attitude is "sophistry," and it derives from the Sophists of ancient Greece. The root of the word means "wisdom." The Sophists claimed to be wise.
That implied, of course, that any opposition to their own ideas was foolish. And that is precisely the position that "progressive" politicians and "objective" journalists take. Indeed, journalists call politicians who agree with them "progressive" because Americans universally believe in progress (i.e., they are not conservative). Journalists and other Democrats use "Objectivity" (applied only to journalists) and "progressivism" (never applied to journalists) as surrogates for "wisdom," but their meaning is the same.
Many Americans, including Jim Robinson and those who subscribe to the tenets of FR, call themselves "conservatives," but the term - like "right wingers" - is actually a slur (much as the term "Yankee" originally was). This is obvious from the fact that "conservatives" are the ones who want to accomplish such things as drilling for the oil in and near ANWR and producing nuclear electric power, whereas "progressives" want to stop the expansion of industry and fuel production - indeed, they want to reduce the production of power. American "conservatives" conserve freedom, and freedom implies the ability to do things that were not done before - the sine qua non of progress.The conceit of the Sophists was rejected by the Philosophers. Philosophers rejected argument from a claim of wisdom, and insisted only that they loved wisdom - not that they were specially endowed with it. Thus the philosopher is open to facts and logic, whereas the sophist is eager to shut off debate.It is obvious that the sophist requires an advantage in power to make it possible to foreclose his opponent's ability to bring facts and logic to the table. The modern sophists of the Democratic Party exploit the PR power of the one-way media for that purpose. The reason they enjoy the overwhelming advantage in that arena is simple - journalists who claim to be objective must band together to sustain their image, and by acting in unison they reject criticism of journalism as a whole by rejecting criticism of each individual journalist. And "progressives" - be they Democratic politicians or labor unionists or plaintiff lawyers or teachers - join in and support the project of sustaining the image of journalism as being objective. All such people have the common objective of promoting criticism above action. "Progressivism" is simply the attitude that criticism and second guessing is what is significant, and the person who undertakes a task and works to achieve it - Theodore Roosevelt's "man in the arena" - counts for nothing.
The irony of the claim of the "progressive" to superior wisdom is that "progressivism" the journalism which it adores is inherently not wise but superficial. The most topical book, for example, will be written on a subject of more enduring significance than a reporter's story which was chosen because it was either bad ("If it bleeds, it leads) or what usually does not happen ("Man Bites Dog, not Dog Bites Man"). And will be written on a much longer deadline, which allows for superior research and editing.