Losers: District Attorney Mike Nifong, the woman who filed the charges, rape victims everywhere, Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty, David Evans, lacrosse teams everywhere, Duke University, North Carolina Central University.
Biggest loser: The media.
Winners: None.
When this story broke more than a year ago, journalists tripped over each other to tell the story and the back-story. Commentators and pundits on television, in print, on the radio and, of course, on the Internet then magnified an already distorted reality by shouting over each other. In their attempt to shed light, they lit a fire of public scorn.
The story we all thought was true: A bunch of privileged white college boys at an elite school took advantage of a poor black woman.
Over the ensuing months, the coverage of the story took another, equally distorted shape: An unstable messed-up stripper and an out-of-control prosecutor ruined three young lives.
To date, the reporting has failed to demonstrate that either of those stories was ever completely true. Even today, with North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper's criticism of Nifong, we know little about the woman who leveled the charges, her motives or her mental state. Few in the audience will care about her now, because she has become one of the bad guys in what continues to be an overly simplistic telling of a very complicated story.
Newsrooms around the country are naming her, in an attempt to compensate for their own excesses. Some, like
The (Raleigh-Durham, N.C.) News and Observer, are explaining this departure from standard practice to their audiences. Many more newsrooms are naming her without explanation. I addressed the issue of whether and when to consider naming accusers in such cases
in an earlier column.
This week, I'm in New York leading
a daylong workshop on sexual assault and the media.
Already I've seen her name and picture more than a dozen times on local and national broadcasts.
Part of the tragedy here is that this story reinforces one of the worst assumptions we have about rape victims -- that they are making it up. This is an almost universal experience for sexual assault victims, whether a family member, a pastor, an intimate partner or a stranger attacks them.
Joanne Archambault is a former San Diego Police Department detective who trains law enforcement officers around the world in how to investigate rape. Her research suggests there are very few false accusations, when it comes to sexual assault.
So why are most people so skeptical? Look at the disproportionate amount of energy and time the media have spent on the Duke story, or the Kobe Bryant story, or the accusations against William Kennedy Smith; then compare that to the millions of other stories about sexual assault.
Our insistence upon ignoring most stories of sexual assault and going beyond the boundaries of responsible journalism with high-profile cases dooms us to forever fail in our primary mission as journalists:
To tell the truth.
I find myself constantly astonished that cable-news commentators in cases...
