Much has been written about double standards in the wake of the Duke lacrosse rape case. Take, for example, this article by Jack Dunphy in the conservative National Review:
The case was simply irresistible to our sophisticated betters in Manhattan and the tonier zip codes of southern California. The “victim” was black and a single mother, each in itself a shield against criticism, but taken together an impregnable defense against any judgment of her own behavior and motives. Furthermore, she claimed to have been attacked by a group of southern white elites, thus justifying the low opinion of such elites held by those who live within sight of the Pacific Ocean or the Hudson River. (Never mind that none of the accused were actually from the south.) Only when the evidence of the defendants’ innocence and of the prosecutor’s misconduct accumulated to an undeniable critical mass did the media slink off to await the next Big Story.
Compare the attention given the Duke case with that accorded a far more heinous crime, one whose victims have thus far failed to arouse the sympathies or even the notice of those who found so much enjoyment in their condemnation of the lacrosse players. Chances are, unless you live in Tennessee, you will not recognize the names Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom. Christian, 21, and Newsome, 23, both of Knoxville, were driving through that city together on the night of January 6 when they were kidnapped and murdered. Newsome’s burned body was found along some railroad tracks on January 7. Christian remained missing for two more days until her body, stuffed in a trash can, was found in a home not far from where Newsome’s was found. Police and prosecutors allege both victims were raped before being killed. Yes, both. Three men and a woman have been charged with the crimes in a 46-count grand jury indictment handed down in Knoxville on January 31.
The story was given a few brief mentions on the AP wire, which were in turn carried on the Fox News and ABC News websites, but you’ll find no mention of the crime in the online archives of CNN, MSNBC, CBS News, the New York Times, or the Washington Post. Run a similar search for stories on the Duke case and you’ll be sifting through the results for hours. It’s not as though these news providers have shied away from crime since being embarrassed in the Duke case. For example, when Tara Grant went missing from her suburban Detroit home in February, the investigation grew and grew in media attention until it became a national story. An AP story appearing on the MSNBC website ran under the headline, “Mich. case a perfect recipe for media frenzy.” And indeed it was. When Grant’s dismembered body was discovered inside her home, triggering a manhunt for her husband and his eventual arrest, the coverage ramped up nearly to the point of Laci Peterson-type saturation. Only the carnival surrounding Anna Nichole Smith’s death kept the Grant murder from being the Story of the Month. Yet the murders of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsome are known to almost no one outside Tennessee. Why?
It’s simple: the four suspects accused of killing Christian and Newsome are blacks from the inner city of Knoxville.
Unfortunately, the first part of Dunphy's article, entitled "The Truth About Who Suffers," obscures some important points that he makes in the second part of his article: non-whites in general, and blacks in particular, are disproportionately victimized by crime -- which, in our racially divided society, remains mostly intraracial.
It's too bad, then, that Dunphy dwelled on an inaccurate critique of the media. While I agree that the mass media has not exactly done a stellar job when it comes to reporting on race in the United States, including the false Duke lacrosse allegations, it is frustrating to see so many of my fellow human beings on the right use the case as a political weapon against their enemies on the left. Take Ann Coulter ("Stripper lied ... white boys fried"), for example:
What we need is a little of that skepticism liberals bring to every single criminal case that is not a white-on-black crime or a rape case involving Bill Clinton.
The truth, as opposed to the larger truth, is that the allegedly powerful white males are at risk of losing their freedom at the hands of a lunatic accuser and a power-mad prosecutor. Meanwhile the allegedly powerless poor black woman has destroyed people's lives with her false accusations, for which she will walk away scot-free.
Don't liberals ever have to pony up at least one example of a powerful privileged white male trampling on the rights of a powerless black woman in order to keep droning on about powerful privileged white males? Every real-life example invariably turns out to be a hoax, among the most spectacular the Tawana Brawley case and now the Duke lacrosse case.
By now, it is clear that the Duke lacrosse case is more than an example of just a false allegation, it's an example of a prosecutor run amok, reveling in the media limelight and exploiting the justice system for political gain. It was a perfect case for the media: sex, power, wealth, race...did I mention sex? But for all the media attention on the case, it's far from clear that a liberal conspiracy designed to oppress whites was at work. For example, although the New York Times has been heavily criticized for its coverage of the case (is there anyone who is happy with the Times with these days?), 60 Minutes has been lauded for publicizing the DNA evidence which ultimately proved the rape charges false.
Conservative media outlets have followed the case with intensity, portraying it as an example of liberals gone crazy. As I write this post, the conservative National Review had 176 web pages on its web site mentioning Duke lacrosse. But of those 176 web pages, only 3 mention James Coleman, a law professor at Duke who is both liberal and black. I suspect the reason why the National Review largely ignores Coleman is that he spoke out against the prosecutor -- and a liberal, black intellectual speaking out against the rush to judgment does not fit comfortably within the narrative assembled by conservative storytellers. It flatly contradicts assertions like this one made by Ann Coulter:
Liberal professors believe that crying wolf is valuable for calling attention to the societal problem of wolves, even though there's never a wolf in any particular case.
Unfortunately, I suspect that many of the conservatives speaking out about Duke are motived less by outrage at injustice and more by their desire to caricature liberals as racists.
If conservative discussion of the Duke case was primarily motivated by legal injustice, you would expect major conservative media outlets to also discuss other similar cases of legal injustice involving overzealous prosecutors, especially in interracial rape cases involving athletes.
But my own quick research shows a lack of interest by conservatives in two major examples of legal injustice.
First, as you may know, at least one hundred men scheduled for execution have been exonerated. These are men who have sat in jail, on death row, waiting to die -- only to be cleared of the the crime that put them on death's door. Clearly, by any stretch, these are men who have suffered a greater injustice than the Duke lacrosse players. (Lest I be unclear, they are all victims.) I recently randomly took names of 9 of those men (Charles Ray Giddens, Anthony Porter, Timothy Hennis, Joseph Green Brown, Delbert Tibbs, Peter Limone, Delma Banks, Earl Washington) and searched nationalreview.com to see if I could find any hits. I found two articles, both about Anthony Porter.
(I know nothing about the racial or ethnic background of those men whose names I mentioned. In all likelihood, they are mostly white. Most homicide is intraracial and although about half of murder victims are black, only 14% of the victims of death row murderers are black.)
If outrage at injustice were the primary motivator of the conservative focus on the Duke case, you would have expected more interest in the cases of the men I mentioned above. Yet there is more coverage of the Duke lacrosse case by a factor of 90:1 than all of those cases combined.
An even better example of a case you would expect conservatives to cover (if they are primarily interested in injustice) is the case of student athlete Genarlow Wilson. Wilson's case has striking similarities to the Duke case. According to ESPN:
Once, he was the homecoming king at Douglas County High. Now he's Georgia inmate No. 1187055, convicted of aggravated child molestation. When he was a senior in high school, he received oral sex from a 10th grader. He was 17. She was 15. Everyone, including the girl and the prosecution, agreed she initiated the act. But because of an archaic Georgia law, it was a misdemeanor for teenagers less than three years apart to have sexual intercourse, but a felony for the same kids to have oral sex. Afterward, the state legislature changed the law to include an oral sex clause, but that doesn't help Wilson.
Unlike the Duke players, Wilson, who is black, was -- and still is -- imprisoned. If anything, his case is superior example of a prosecutor run amok.Yet there is not a single article on the National Review's web site about his case. Absolutely nothing.
What's more, if the conservative narrative that the mainstream media is liberal and preoccupied with attacking white men in power were true, then you would surely expect massive coverage of the Wilson case. Yet even that most reviled of rags, the former home of WMD expert Judith Miller (sic), the New York Times, has published a scant five articles even mentioning his name. A quick search of Google News reveals about 45 articles mentioning Wilson and 4,000 mentioning Duke.
Given these double standards, it seems pretty clear that outrage in the conservative media at the Duke case is less a reflection of intellectual honesty and concern for injustice than it is a conscious effort to rally the right and delegitimize the political left.
© Jed Lewison