Tuesday, February 07, 2012

Poynter & The Serial Fabricator

I recently did a post at Minding the Campus examining how the media responded to the Times’ Patrick Witt article—a piece of “journalism” that’s looking worse by the day, and which the Times public editor has now repudiated.

The most extraordinary (and counterintuitive) critique came from Poynter’s Kelly McBride—who faulted the Times, which had bent over backwards to frame the case against Witt as negatively as possible, for not doing enough to ensure that Witt’s accuser’s story was represented. To bolster her line of argument, McBride turned to adjunct law professor Wendy Murphy, who had distinguished herself in the lacrosse case for her willingness to fabricate, fabricate again, and fabricate some more.

Poynter describes its mission as promoting “excellence and integrity in the practice of craft.” The organization claims that “we teach . . . ethical decision-making,” with teaching “focused on the highest standards of journalistic value.” How could this type of organization turn to a serial fabricator such as Murphy?

In an e-mail, I provided McBride with a list of many (but not all) of Murphy’s public, factual inaccuracies (as well as her various unsubstantiated opinions and denigrations of due process). McBride replied that she saw no problem at all in her use of Murphy as either a source or a seminar instructor. She even seemed willing to rationalize Murphy’s difficulties with the truth, describing the list in the following manner: “Some of those statements are her opinions. Some of them are statements she made based on her expertise in the subject area. Some of them are taken out of context.” I invited McBride to identify any of the factual errors as items “taken out of context”; she did not reply.

No one would expect McBride to be an expert on Murphy’s record in the lacrosse case (although the media’s failures, and Murphy’s role in them, was explored at great length in the American Journalism Review, which presumably is on every Poynter faculty member’s regular reading list). But it seems as if Murphy’s serial fabrications mattered not to McBride, who affirmed that even after hearing of them, she’d eagerly invite Murphy back to teach at Poynter.

McBride’s response confirms observations from Alex Pareene, who described Murphy’s career as showing that “there are, in the mass media, absolutely no consequences for blatant, constant lying,” and Radley Balko, who came away from his own experience of Murphy inventing facts to ask, “At some point you have to wonder, is it even possible to be too shameless for cable news?” It seems that as long as Murphy still gets quoted by the media and retains the backing of like-minded figures within the “victims’ rights” movement, two alleged Murphy qualifications mentioned by McBride, she’ll receive Poynter’s seal of approval—factual inaccuracies and wildly intemperate, unsubstantiated opinions be damned. Would Poynter be as cavalier if women or minority groups had been the targets of Murphy’s bile?

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Between April 5, 2006 and December 31, 2006, Murphy made no fewer than 18 factually inaccurate statements in her TV commentary about the lacrosse case. She made at least eight more factually inaccurate statements about the case in December 21, 2006 and January 9, 2007 “talking points” forwarded by “victims’ rights” groups, plus at least one factual error in a late 2006 USA Today op-ed. Twenty-seven outright errors of fact on a single case is quite a tally. And that list, of course, doesn’t include Murphy’s misleading statements that were phrased in the form of questions or speculation, or her use of unsubstantiated rumors.

Facts are facts, and McBride’s insinuation that “context” could somehow transform Murphy’s factual errors into “facts” is absurd. But context does matter in interpreting factual errors. That Murphy’s factual errors weren’t random but almost always tilted against the lacrosse players suggests she wasn’t simply amazingly sloppy (a problem that in and of itself would seem to disqualify someone as a Poynter source or seminar instructor). Instead, Murphy’s fabrications bolstered her preconceived views, suggesting deliberateness to her fabrications.

In this respect, and despite McBride’s implication, the broader context of Murphy’s remarks was even more damning than the myriad factual inaccuracies taken alone. Beyond factually inaccurate descriptions of North Carolina legal procedures or some defense motions, each time in such a way to reinforce the ultimately-disbarred Mike Nifong’s position, Murphy’s serial fabrications tended to fall into one of three general categories:

(1) The April 4, 2006 photo array, which provided the only specific evidence used to indict the three falsely accused players and which Nifong had ordered the DPD to confine to members of the lacrosse team, did not violate DPD procedures, because many lacrosse players didn’t attend the party, and therefore these non-attendees could be deemed fillers. Confirmation for this “fact” came from a neutral source on the criminal case, Duke president Richard Brodhead.

Here was the Poynter source/seminar instructor on May 2, 2006: “According to Durham president, the president of the university, he said March 22 in a press release, many players weren’t there that night. Well, what does that tell us? It tells us the defense motion [on the lineup] is a bunch of nonsense, because if many players weren’t there, it’s a darned good chance if this was a hoax that she could have gotten it wrong.” Murphy returned to the theme in a December 21 e-mail: “The line-ups were not unlawful. According to the president of Duke, ‘many’ players were not at the party—and many NON-players WERE.” [Emphasis added in both instances; capitalization in original.]

Murphy’s description of Durham’s lineup procedures was wrong: Nifong had publicly identified as suspects all 46 white lacrosse players, the only people included in the April 4 photo array, and the Durham Police Department procedures required photos of five non-suspects for each photo of a suspect. Wouldn’t a lawyer understand the definition of a non-suspect?

In the event, the most extraordinary element of these two statements came in Murphy’s invention of a Brodhead statement regarding the party’s composition. John Burness, Duke’s then-P.R. head, confirmed that Brodhead made no statement, of any kind, about the case on March 22, 2006; and that Brodhead never claimed, one way or the other, to possess knowledge on who did or did not attend the party. Murphy simply made up a statement to corroborate her preconceived viewpoint.

(2) Considerable evidence actually bolstered the prosecution’s version of events, although defense attorneys or the media concealed some of this evidence.

Murphy looked to bolster false accuser Crystal Mangum’s credibility to pointing out that “Brett and Matt happen to be the real names of two of the captains who lived in that home.” (At least in some of her myriad stories, Mangum had claimed that her attackers were named Adam, Matt, and Brett.) But Murphy’s statement was factually inaccurate: the first names of the captains who lived at the house were Matt, Dave, and Dan, and their names had been widely reported.

In a May 2, 2006 interview, Murphy pointed to hidden evidence (that, in fact, didn’t exist and that the police and Nifong had never claimed existed). Dismissing test results that indicated no DNA matches to any of the lacrosse players, Murphy asserted that “the broomstick DNA has not yet been revealed.” The only problem: there was no “broomstick DNA,” since even the mentally imbalanced Mangum had never claimed an assault by broomstick.

Turning her concealment argument to the lawyers, Murphy suggested that the defense attorneys had “withheld” 1000 pages of documents (sometimes she said the figure was 1200). In fact, Judge Osborn Smith had ordered the pages to be sealed, because they contained Mangum’s psychological records. That ruling had been made in open court, and was widely reported; defense attorneys releasing the records would have placed them in contempt.

When all else failed, Murphy accused the lacrosse players and their attorneys of criminal obstruction, as in her assertion that “all the photographs showing how really fine [Mangum] was when she left scene [photos frequently cited in various defense motions] were doctored, where the date stamp was actually fraudulent.” [Emphasis added in both instances.] Even the utterly corrupt Mike Nifong never challenged the photos’ veracity, and the subsequent AG’s investigation confirmed the photos’ accuracy by cross-checking various other forms of electronic data.

(3) The lacrosse players behaved as if they were guilty; or had profiles that would lead a fair-minded observer to believe they might be guilty.

In one of her first appearances on the case, on April 19, 2006, Murphy reported some basic, and seemingly troublesome, “facts”: “All of them [the lacrosse players] took the Fifth. All of them refused to cooperate. All of them refused to give a DNA sample, until the court produced an order compelling them to do so.”

Each of these three statements was a lie. No player ever invoked the Fifth Amendment, at any point in the case. The three captains who lived in the house where the party occurred cooperated (foolishly, in retrospect) wholly with police, including voluntarily giving DNA samples and offering to take lie-detector tests. A few days before this parade of falsehoods, the Poynter source/seminar instructor had invented a statement by an unidentified neighbor asserting that members of the 2006 lacrosse team had committed “other sexual offenses.” No such statement existed, and no members of the team had committed “other sexual offenses.”

The pattern of Murphy making up “facts” to portray the lacrosse players as behaving suspiciously continued throughout the case. One of the people picked by Mangum, Reade Seligmann, had an unimpeachable electronic alibi (he had called a cab with his cell phone, and then was shown on a time-stamped ATM video more than a mile away from the captains’ house) for the time of the alleged attack. This was a major problem for Nifong, but not for Murphy; in a December 21, 2006 e-mail, she simply altered “facts” to make Seligmann look guilty. She wrote, “In fact, the guy Seligman [sic] who claims his cell phone calls ‘prove’ his innocence actually lends support to the theory that he was the first guy to assault her—which is what she claims—and that it was oral—because he could have assaulted her for the first few minutes—then thought to himself ‘I’ve got to get out of here’—which explains why he frantically and repeatedly called a cab. who frantically calls a cab to see if they’re coming—in a space of five minutes—especially considering that the guy went to an ATM and a pizza place when he left—no real emergency there. Isn’t it convenient that he just happens to be one of the guys she accused?”

This statement had no relationship with the truth. Though Mangum never told the same story twice, she never claimed that one of her attackers left during the attack, nor that any of her attackers had used a telephone, nor did she ever make any clear claim that Seligmann could be identified as “the first guy to assault her.” Seligmann, whose cell-phone records were posted on the web for Murphy to see, didn’t “frantically and repeatedly call[] a cab”; he called the cab once, and the cab came a few minutes later. And before Murphy’s statement, no one had ever claimed that Seligmann went to “a pizza place when he left.”

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Perhaps the most outrageous thing that Murphy said during the lacrosse case was not, because of the way she framed her remark, a demonstrably untrue statement. On May 3, 2006, in an appearance on “CNN Live,” the Poynter source/seminar instructor mused, “I bet one or more of the players was, you know, molested or something as a child.”

An unsubstantiated insinuation, on national TV, that a college student was sexually molested? That’s a disgusting statement—indicative of a coarse mind and a bullying temperament, not “dynamic and thought-provoking,” which is how McBride describes Murphy. Yet McBride, by her own admission, wasn’t surprised to see the Poynter source/seminar instructor make such an assertion. If insinuating child abuse against people* about whom she knew nothing isn’t enough for disqualify Murphy in McBride’s eyes, what would constitute going too far? And how, possibly, could a figure who made such a remark provide instruction “focused on the highest standards of journalistic value” that would promote “excellence and integrity in the practice of craft”?

In recent months, the departure of Jim Romenesko somewhat tarnished Poynter’s reputation, as has the organization’s uneven (or worse, as SI’s Richard Deitsch might suggest) performance as ESPN ombudsman. But I always had believed that Poynter was committed to journalistic integrity, and never considered that it might be an organization that would use a serial fabricator as both a source and a seminar instructor for guiding journalists’ behavior.

It appears that I was wrong in these beliefs. And unlike Wendy Murphy, I’m willing to admit when I make a mistake.

*--modified for clarity

15 comments:

Anonymous said...

You absolutely cannot claim professional media status while at the same time relying on Wendy Murphy for a legal opinion.

But to continue to use Murphy after knowing better proves that Poynter's Kelly McBride is no longer interested in pretending to provide a professional service.

William L. Anderson said...

Great, great post. By using Murphy as an "expert" who has "credibility," Poynter proves beyond a doubt that accuracy is not prized with that organization.

We have to stop thinking that the modern, mainstream media people actually care about facts. Witness the silence that came from the august Columbia Journalism Review after the Lacrosse Case. Despite the fact that the case was heavily publicized and involved huge factual inaccuracies in "The Newspaper of Record," CJR completely ignored it.

This was not due to any doubts about the case or its coverage. It was bias pure and simple. The outcome of this case contradicted the Narrative that CJR and the others in the mainstream media wanted, so they decided to shove it down the Orwellian Memory Hole.

Anonymous said...

The New York Times and Wendy Murphy are pathetic examples of the lengths to which intellectual snobs will go to avoid admitting wrongdoing.

Anonymous said...

McBride is a well-known nitwit, and the Poynter Institute is generally regarded as a joke by actual journalists.

Anonymous said...

Let us not forget, after the players were exonerated, Murphy said Mike Nifong would publish a book which would blow the lid off the case.

If this is true, Mr. Nifong must be working with Wonderful Wahneema Lubiano, the queen of the forthcoming. No one has seen even a hint of Mr. Nifong's book.

Anonymous said...

If CJR completely ignored the lacrosse case, I guessed I must be hallucinating this article.

Or maybe Anderson doesn't believe in admitting facts that contradict his narrative about that wonderful abstraction "the mainstream media."

Anonymous said...

This is similar to the corollary to Godwin's law that dictates the immediate loss of an argument. Any employment of Murphy as an expert invalidates the case the writer is making as the comment at 01:56 points out. Maybe this should be called "KC's Law".

Anonymous said...

Can I accuse Wendy Murphy of raping me when she was a Greek hopilite and I was Helen of Troy.

Fortunately, reincarnation gives me the opportunity to bring out the facts in this matter.

... as Wendy says, a charge of rape is always true.

Anonymous said...

Put Murphy in as Durham prosecutor. Then she, too, can be removed.

Are Cline and Murphy Communists?

Anonymous said...

Can Murphy be realistically be sued? If so, who could do so successfully? It would be nice to stop this train wreck of a person.

Anonymous said...

Wendy Murphy could testify as a character witness at Crystal Mangum's murder trial. I mean, Murphy knows everything because she makes up the truth and can vouch that Mangum was assaulted, raped, nearly killed and was only defending her honor. She should know.

Bumper said...

The Dean of Faculty at the Poynter Institute, Stephen Buckley, is a graduate of ... drum roll please ... Duke University and is black.

kcjohnson9 said...

To the 7.10:

The article to which you have linked was published in the American Journalism Review, and I mentioned it, in this sentence, in the post: "No one would expect McBride to be an expert on Murphy’s record in the lacrosse case (although the media’s failures, and Murphy’s role in them, was explored at great length in the American Journalism Review, which presumably is on every Poynter faculty member’s regular reading list)."

Bill Anderson's comment referred to the CJR (the Columbia Journalism Review), a different publication.

Although it's not generally my habit to clear factually inaccurate comments, I wanted to do so in this instance (with the correction as now noted above) to clear up the matter.

Chris Halkides said...

For what it’s worth Murphy’s coverage of the Knox/Sollecito case was also filled with misleading or false statements. My rebuttal to her four talking points are: 1. The existence of Meredith’s DNA is not in doubt. Two court-appointed, independent experts examined the evidence and concluded that it was meaningless. Far from being scrubbed and treated with bleach, the knife still had starch. The prosecution would have us believe that all supposed traces of blood were removed yet the DNA remained and that this knife was one of two used for the crime (the second of which was allegedly disposed). No wonder the independent experts suggested contamination (not evidence-tampering). 2. Mixed DNA is likely when people cohabitate, and even likelier when the forensics team samples large areas of a toilet or bidet with a single swab. Knox said the bathroom was clean, not so clean as to be free of DNA (a mind-boggling standard, yet one that was actually used against her and Sollecito in the first trial). Knox acknowledged that several drops of her (unmixed) blood that were on her faucet may have come from her infected ear piercings. 3. Knox had only two stories, namely what she said under the pressure of interrogation and what she said before and after. The computer and phone records that the police did not damage support Knox’s and Sollecito’s stories. Knox and Sollecito used nothing stronger than marijuana on the night of the murder. Knox got information wrong about the position of the body and knew nothing that only the killer would know. 4. Knox fully withdrew her false accusation against Lumumba within 36 hours of making it. The accusation itself is so vague that no conscientious police officer would take it seriously. The notion that Knox’s false statement was racially motivated is nonsense; the police wanted her to make a statement against Lumumba and (under pressure) she did. The moral of this case is never talk to police without a lawyer. Murphy should think twice before writing such drivel.

Jim McCarthy said...

Another excellent post, KC, and the arrogance at Poynter can really be a sight to behold. I'll add a vignette of my own, if I may. A few years ago, ESPN outsourced its ombudsman role to a team at Poynter that included Kelly McBride. My clients at American Sports Council, the leading group working for Title IX reform, objected to ESPN's fawning coverage during the law's 40th anniversary. The coverage was nothing short of worshipful, included an advertising/promo spend, and totally excluded any voices or sources that were critical or had been harmed by the law. But get this -- with some basic research we discovered that the primary lobbying group on Title IX and the main obstacle to reform, the Women's Sports Foundation, was receiving donations from ESPN.

Think about that for a second -- ESPN was purporting to objectively cover Title IX as a news organization while at the same time funding a lobbying outfit that fights tooth and nail on the issue. So I called Kelly McBride directly and pointed all this out. At her suggestion I followed up with a note detailing the specifics to her colleague Steve Buckley, copied below. A few days later, McBride called me back to say that they didn't have the time or resources to prioritize the matter and would therefore pass on covering it. Go jump in a lake, in other words.

So it remains simply incredible to me that McBride postures herself as a vigilant guardian of ethics in journalism when, if gender politics is part of the equation, no sin or malfeasance is too great to overlook. Just disgraceful.

~ Jim McCarthy
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From: Jim McCarthy
Subject: Following up re: ESPN/Title IX
Date: May 29, 2012 6:13:12 PM EDT
To: [redacted] @poynter.org

Stephen,

Thanks again for taking the time to follow up with me today. Here below are the main points of complaint we have with ESPN's coverage of Title IX and the upcoming 40th Anniversary of the law next month. As I'm sure you know, ESPN has a dedicated online platform about this coverage and is devoting significant resources to the story/issue.

* ESPN has been making financial contributions to the Women's Sports Foundation (WSF), a lobbying/advocacy group that pushes for expanded and more stringent Title IX enforcement. The funding has never been disclosed to readers/viewers and ESPN's coverage of WSF and its perspective has been consistently positive and uncritical -- even though the issue of Title IX's impact is deeply disputed.

* ESPN only presents one side of the issue and relies on a handful of sources to share the same talking points.

* For example, ESPN has not granted American Sports Council any space in its Title IX coverage, yet we are the leading national organization working for reform of the law and drawing attention to the challenges faced by athletes because of current Title IX enforcement.

* ESPN author Peter Keating has ignored our email and open letter pointing out specific errors and also conflict of interest. See full letter below.

* Comment strings under the articles show that average ESPN readers are upset with the slanted coverage and want to see fact-based reporting.

Look forward to hearing your thoughts…

Thanks, Jim McCarthy