Regardless of the Truth

[Dorothy_ParkerX]

<p>(or, all the news that is fit to print)</p>

<p>The Duke LAX thread seems to have faded away. Just read this article on the subject and thought to share it:</p>

<p>From
The New Criterion</p>

<p>

“…Nifong was certainly part of that “tragic rush to accuse.” As was Syracuse University, which decided not to accept as transfers any students from the Duke lacrosse team—not just the three accused chaps, mind you, but anyone contaminated by having played lacrosse for Duke…the role of the media, which with few exceptions descended on the story like Lord Byron’s fabled Assyrian and his cohorts pursuing the destruction of Sennacherib. Oh, how The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and countless other bastions of liberal self-satisfaction loved it! Race. Class. Sex. Victimhood. It was the perfect morality tale. Those white jocks at “the Harvard of the South” just had to be guilty. And what a good time we were all going to have lacerating the malefactors while at the same time preening ourselves on our own superior virtue!..
The novelist Allan Gurganis epitomized the tone in an op-ed last April: “The children of privilege,” he thundered, “feel vividly alive only while victimizing, even torturing.” You don’t say? Even sports writers got into the act. Selena Roberts located Duke University “at the intersection of entitlement and enablement, … virtuous on the outside, debauched on the inside.” In August, as Nifong’s case was betraying worrisome fissures, the Times published a 7,000-word article arguing—“praying” might be a more apposite term—that, whatever weaknesses there might be in the prosecution’s case, “there is also a body of evidence to support [taking] the matter to a jury.”</p>

<p>Not, of course, that the Times was alone. Even after the lacrosse players had been declared innocent, The Boston Globe began an editorial stating that “three members of the Duke lacrosse team may have been louts, but all the evidence suggests they were not rapists.” “Suggests,” you see. Not “shows” or “demonstrates,” even though the Attorney General declared the athletes innocent of all charges. And what evidence is there to suggest that they are “louts”? They have to be louts, countless character references and testimonials to the contrary, otherwise the story wouldn’t go according to script. </p>

<p>…Vincent Carroll, writing recently in the Rocky Mountain News, noted, “the most astonishing fact, hands down, was and remains the squalid behavior of the community of scholars at Duke itself. For months nearly the entire faculty fell into one of two camps: those who demanded the verdict first and the trial later, and those whose silence enabled their vigilante colleagues to set the tone.”

<a href=“404 | The New Criterion”>404 | The New Criterion;

[berurah]

<p>Thanks for this link, DPX. I see you have to be a subscriber to get in, so I can’t get the whole thing, but from what I see here, I’d give this a HUMONGOUS thumbs up! It looks well worth reading–and definitely tells it like it is.</p>