The media lynch mob gets no suspension

Howard Kurtz:

There's a lot going on the last couple of days--MSNBC booting Imus, McCain's big speech on the war, Fred Thompson's cancer, Larry Birkhead prancing before the cameras, and, oh yeah, the Duke sexual assault charges were dropped.

I hope that last one gets plenty of coverage, even though it's been clear for some time that the case had fallen apart. As long as we're talking about how the Rutgers women were unfairly disparaged as "ho's," consider the nightmare that the three Duke lacrosse players have lived through.

But in all the coverage you read and see about the clearing of these young men, very little of it will be devoted to the media's role in ruining their lives. I didn't hear a single television analyst mention it yesterday, even though two of the players' lawyers took shots at the press.

It was an awful performance, no question about it. News organizations took one woman's shaky allegations and turned them into a national soap opera, pillorying the reputations of the players. Reade Seligmann, Colin Finnerty and David Evans were presumed innocent in a legal sense, but not in the court of media opinion.

We will now read 100 stories about how an obsessive prosecutor overreached in bringing the indictments in the first place, and that's fine. But keep in mind that the Duke case was all over the network newscasts, the morning shows, the cable channels and the front pages. Newsweek put two of the defendants' mug shots on the cover. "I'm so glad they didn't miss a lacrosse game over a little thing like gang rape," Nancy Grace said on Headline News.

...

Many in the media were as disgraceful as the petitioners on the Duke faculty who also joined the lynch mob that also rushed to judgment against the white boys. The story fit their prejudice. The same jackals who are trying to Give Don Imus a career death penalty for an insulting joke were chasing these student athletes at Duke as they coiled a rope to hang them with.

If the Rutgers women basketball team did not deserve to be the object of an insult (and they did not), what makes the Duke Lacrosse players deserving of the shabby treatment they were given by many of the same people who have denounce the insult against a women's basketball team.

More in the media need to go on an Imus like apology tour for their treatment of these young men.