All Blog Posts from Public Eye

"…all the commentary I've seen and in analysis on the air today, it's all about what the prosecutor did wrong, how the legal system didn't work -- very little about the media's role here in pumping this up into a national frenzy. The legal miscarriage of justice in this case, Paula, ended today. But the media miscarriage and the stains from that are going to linger for a long time."

--Howard Kurtz, talking about the media's culpability in the Duke rape case last night on CNN.

As I noted earlier, CBS News has decided not to name the accuser in the Duke rape case. But some denizens of the Internet have other ideas: Her name has started popping up on CBSNews.com today, in the comments section of the site. According to Mike Sims, CBSNews.com Director of News and Operations, the site will not be deleting the comments that mention her name.

"The name was used by a member of the public on our message boards, and in this case we will let it stand because it's in the public comment area," says Sims. "Although CBS News won't use the name in our reporting, we're going to leave it there because it has been reported widely in the mainstream media, both in her community and across the country." Sims says the site prefers not to delete comments whenever possible.

Yesterday, I wondered if the "Evening News," which devoted most of last night's broadcast to the Duke rape case, would name the accuser. Some other media outlets are now using her name; the New York Post, which put her picture on its cover, ran a column arguing that if "a rape accuser is revealed as a liar, her name should be spoken loudly and often - as loudly and often as the names of those whom she falsely accused have been over the past year."

CBS News, we now know, has elected not to name the accuser. In an email, Linda Mason, Senior Vice President, Standards and Special Projects, told me why.

"We made a decision NOT to air the name or picture of the accuser although we have both," wrote Mason. "Part of the rationale is that the [North Carolina] prosecutor did not charge her and kept certain information about her under seal...the story seemed to be the boys, their families and Duke."

Media outlets are starting to name the accuser in the Duke rape case. CBSNews.com has not done so as of yet. Will the "Evening News," which is devoting "most of the broadcast" to the story tonight, use her name?

Both "Evening News" anchor Katie Couric and "Early Show" anchor Harry Smith are reporting from Raleigh, North Carolina as part of CBS News' coverage of the Duke rape case.

I'm a little bit surprised so much of tonight's show is being given over to the Duke saga. This isn't a new story, after all, and the latest development – the charges being dropped – has been expected for a while now.

Still, the story certainly has cultural significance. And CBS News may feel some ownership over it in light of Ed Bradley's Peabody award winning "60 Minutes" piece, which went a long way towards swaying public opinion in favor of the accused. "60 Minutes" is certainly staying on the story: The Duke players will be featured on the show on Sunday, in an interview with Lesley Stahl.

I've posted Couric's "First Look" above – just click on the video box to watch. In it, she discusses what stories will be on the show tonight, as well as why the "Evening News" came to Raleigh.

"We're here because this really is a story that is about so many important issues in our society today," says Couric. "It's about race, it's about class, it's about the criminal justice system. And we thought it was an important opportunity for us to give more perspective, and a really thorough look at what happened here, what transpired, and why. And really to catch up with some of the key players in this whole saga."

Couric, who will be interviewing the parents of one of the accused players, notes that "we'll be spending most of the broadcast tonight focused on this story."

Over at Newsbusters, Tim Graham has used David Duke's recent appearance on CNN to make a point. (Here's the video of the appearance, which I can't recommend enough.) Writes Graham: "Conservatives have often been outraged that liberals would suggest Duke was one of them, when he always appears in the liberal media, and not on conservative talk radio." Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader and Louisiana state representative, recently appeared at a "two-day gathering of Holocaust deniers and white supremacists" in Tehran.

Graham is somewhat overreaching by tying his point to the Blitzer interview, as CNN did not link Duke to Republicans, opting instead to focus largely on his KKK past. But there are legitimate questions to be asked about news organizations propping up polarizing extremists who could be seen to represent people far more in the mainstream. Graham has given us an example from the right, so here's one from the left: Ward Churchill, an obscure, far-left University of Colorado professor who, as I noted in May of last year, was covered 25 times in a four-month period on "The O'Reilly Factor."

Neither Ward Churchill or David Duke can be said to represent anyone other than themselves and a small, fringe group of people of negligible importance. The question for news outlets is to what degree these people should be given a platform. They undeniably make for good television, which is why even folks like Fred Phelps get on the air. But they do not articulate views that represent the views of more than a small sliver of Americans. There's no question that it's important to pay attention to extremists if their ranks start growing or if there are other reasons we need to take them seriously. (It's important to cover people like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, for example, because of their political power.) But it's hard to see a justification for grabbing the loudest wacko from off the street corner and putting him in front of a camera.

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Felix Gillette at CJR Daily has noted a discrepancy between the "60 Minutes" story on the Duke lacrosse rape case that aired on television and the Web version of said story. (Full disclosure: Gillette is a friend, and I used to work at CJR Daily.)

As Gillette notes, the Web version of the story included "some additional bleeping" that was not present in the broadcast. The passage in question is this one, in which Kim Roberts, the dancer who performed at the party with the accuser, recalls her interaction with one of the lacrosse players:

"I called him a little [expletive] white boy," she recalls laughing. "And how he couldn't get it on his own and had to pay for it. So, he was mad. And it ended with him callin' me the n-word. And it echoed, so you heard n..... once, and then you heard, n....., n....., n..... ."

On the broadcast, nothing was bleeped out – not the n-word, and not the "expletive." Gillette contacted "60 Minutes" spokesman Kevin Tedesco, who explained that the discrepancy was a mistake. I spoke to Mike Sims, director of News and Operations for CBSNews.com, for further clarification.

"In general, both those words are not appropriate for the Web site," said Sims. "In this specific case, we failed to check with the broadcast to see if they were going to bleep it or not. We believed that they were going to bleep it, and we would be consistent. End of story. So that's a mistake. We wrongly assumed they were going to bleep it."

Sims went on to say that "if we had known they were going to do it, and I had been called, I probably would have waved the policy and allowed them to use the words. But I probably would have had to think about it." He has elected to keep the original version of the story, with the words bleeped, on the site.

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The lead story on last night's "60 Minutes" concerned the Duke rape case. The piece lays out evidence that suggests that the charges against the three indicted lacrosse players may be false.

"Over the past six months, 60 Minutes has examined nearly the entire case file, more than 2,000 documents, including police reports, witness statements and medical records," says Ed Bradley in his introduction. "The evidence 60 Minutes has seen reveals disturbing facts about the conduct of the police and the district attorney, and raises serious concerns about whether or not a rape even occurred." I will not rehash the evidence here, but please have a look at the story if you have not yet seen it.

We still don't know how this case will play out. Last night's piece suggested that there are major holes in the case against the students, but District Attorney Mike Nifong did not sit for an interview to present his side of the story. Still, there seems to be a strong possibility that the three students – two of whom had their mug shots appear on the cover of Newsweek under the headline "Sex, Lies & Duke" – may well be innocent of the crime they're accused of. "It’s changed my life forever, no matter what happens from here on out," Collin Finnerty, one of the accused, said last night. "It’s probably gonna be something that defines me my whole life."

That may not be the case had the media not identified the students. There are good reasons not to identify the accuser in a rape case – chief among them that people are more likely to report a rape if they don't have to deal with the social ramifications of having been a victim. But perhaps its time the media start showing some restraint when it comes to how it treats not just the accuser but the accused. Let's assume that the Duke students are innocent. As Finnerty suggests, their lives will be defined by the accusation regardless. Some people will likely always believe them to be rapists regardless of the facts. That's a horrible reality to have to face.

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Media coverage of the Duke lacrosse scandal, which reached fever pitch when it first emerged in March, has somewhat dissipated by now. But in an analysis about the state of the case thus far, Newsweek suggests this week that based on the evidence currently available, the prosecutor’s case is flimsy – a take on the story that is quite different from its initial storyline in the press. Evan Thomas and Susannah Meadows acknowledge that while some early reporting on the story “raised doubt about the guilt of the players” it “more typically played as a morality tale of pampered jocks gone wild.” Thomas and Meadows acknowledge that coverage of the case has been “enormous,” noting their magazine’s own treatment of the story: “Newsweek put the mug shots of two of the players—Reade Seligmann, 20, and Collin Finnerty, 19—on its cover the week after they were indicted.”

The article appears to suggest that based on the evidence so far, perhaps the story didn’t warrant so much attention. Writes Newsweek:

“It is possible, almost three months later, that the players are maintaining a conspiracy of silence. But it seems highly unlikely. Rather, court documents in the case increasingly suggest that Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong had very little evidence upon which to indict three players for rape. Indeed, the available evidence is so thin or contradictory that it seems fair to ask what Nifong could have been thinking when he confidently told reporters that there was ‘no doubt’ in his mind that the woman had been raped at the party held by the lacrosse team.”

Nifong is required by law to turn over all of his evidence to the defense, and is expected to submit more this week. Newsweek’s account of the case thus far is “based on documents publicly available in court filings, and the defense, of course, is putting its own spin on the case. It is conceivable that Nifong is holding back some kind of smoking gun, but, given the rules and the publicity about the case, that does not seem likely.”

Nifong has stopped granting media interviews and has his own criticisms of how the story has been treated by the press and, by extension, the blogosphere...

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The results of the special election to take over the congressional seat of disgraced Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham are big news today. Why? It's the narrative, stupid: As more than one media outlet has gone out of its way to inform us, the election, which was won by Republican Brian Bilbray in a close race, is considered a "bellwether" for what's going to happen come Election Day in November. The "contest [is] seen as a gauge of voter attitudes for the national midterm elections," said the San Diego Union-Tribune in its lede. The race is "a possible early barometer of next fall's vote," declared the Associated Press.

To some extent, that's true – the race involved a number of the themes that will come into play in the midterms, most notably voter perception of Republican corruption. Already, both sides are trying to spin the results as good news for their side. I won't get into the specifics of all the critiques, but the general spin from the left is that the fact that the race was so close, despite the fact that the district is heavily conservative, is good news for Democrats. The right, on the other hand, counters that if Republicans can still win a race to replace Cunningham, a man who is presently sitting in jail, the Democrats' "culture of corruption" strategy is in trouble.

Let's put all that aside for the moment and focus on what's most interesting from a media perspective, however: The degree to which this race had a "wag the dog" quality. As Chris Bowers points out, Republicans spent $4.5M in committee money on the race in an effort "to change the media narrative on the election in their favor." And that, perhaps, is what's worth paying attention to: Not that Republicans spent a lot to win for the sake of the seat, but that they spent a lot to win in large part to manipulate the media.

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