The template/storyline on Duke players failed the media

John Leo:

Newsrooms tend to follow a conventional story line on social issues. As the late commentator and editor Michael Kelly wrote, "most journalists learn to see the world through a set of standard templates into which they plug each day's events." The most obvious templates concern race — whites are oppressing blacks, gender — men are oppressing women, and class — the privileged are oppressing the poor.

Since all three of these templates were in play during the Duke race case, how surprising is it that this triple high tide resulted in some of the worst journalism of the decade?

Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post, the best of our press critics, wrote that almost everybody wrote that the Rutgers women's basketball team had been unfairly maligned by Don Imus, but in the case of the Duke lacrosse players "very few have talked about how the media slimed them."

Much of the reporting, perhaps most of it, committed early to the truth of the rape accusation and the guilt of the lacrosse players. News stories kept reminding us that a struggling black single mother and college student was confronting the arrogant racist power of privileged thugs. As reporters stuck close to the well-established story line, fact-free journalism flourished.

Stuart Taylor saw through the hoax in a devastating May 2006 column in the National Journal. It should have ended the orgy of conventional reporting in major papers, but templates are hard to overcome.

In August, the New York Times ran a stupefying 5,600-word analysis that sloughed off or ignored all the mounting evidence of prosecutorial fraud. A Brooklyn College professor, K.C. Johnson, who ran brilliant daily commentary on the case in his Durham-in-Wonderland Web site, recently listed the 10 worst articles on the case to appear in major papers over the last year. The Times' 5,600-word mess was the grand prizewinner.

And some writers, unable to give up on conventional template coverage even now, are still attacking the lacrosse players....

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As late as March 25 the NY Times was still carrying stories bemoaning the potential exoneration of the players. Where is Johnny Cochran when he is needed? When the template doesn't fit, the media must acquit.

Also check out Thomas Sowell's piece on the gutless lynch mob in Durham who help perpetrate the storyline/template.