March Madness, I

March Madness is in full force—everywhere, that is, except on the Duke campus, where NCAA bracket pools are forbidden under the anti-gambling provisions of the school’s draconian new student behavior code. This blog’s version of March “madness” seeks to determine the worst of the case, in four categories:

• op-eds/editorials;
• “news” articles;
• publications by Duke arts and sciences faculty;
• soundbites.

Today, the ten worst op-eds or editorials of the case. A caveat: I’ve excluded the work of transparent race-baiters such as Barry Saunders of the N&O or Shadee Malaklou of the Chronicle, who seem chiefly interested in provoking controversy through arguments they themselves don't seem to take seriously. I’ve also excluded the Allan Gurganus New York Times op-ed, whose chief motivation seemed to be winning favors for a future job application to the Duke English Department.

Here’s the list, with the worst of the worst ranked #1. Reader nominations are welcome in the comment thread. Worst of the hard-news articles tomorrow.

10.) Steve Ford, “No Gong for Mike Nifong—Yet,” N&O, Nov. 12, 2006. In this column, Ford explained why the N&O editorial board made no endorsement in the DA’s race, even though its news division had exposed Nifong’s unethical activities. His thesis? Even if voters have an unethical or incompetent DA, the ballot box isn’t the appropriate venue to act. Instead, the public and media should sit back and allow the DA to wreak havoc, hoping that the State Bar eventually acts.

9.) Eugene Robinson, “Tough Questions in Durham,” Washington Post, April 25, 2006. Robinson presented the “context” argument: he found it “impossible to avoid thinking of all the black women who were violated by drunken white men in the American South over the centuries. The master-slave relationship, the tradition of droit du seigneur, the use of sexual possession as an instrument of domination—all this ugliness floods the mind, unbidden, and refuses to leave.” And since it was “quite possible we’ll never have a truly satisfactory answer” as to what actually occurred at the party, Robinson didn’t have to worry about inconvenient facts undermining his argument.

8.) “Outrage at Duke Lacrosse Players,” Herald-Sun, March 28, 2006. The first of more than 20 slanted H-S editorials, and in some ways the worst of the lot. The editorial praised the potbangers, hoping that “the banging drums served as a wake-up call that the students’ obnoxious fun and games have taken a very serious turn.” The editorial inaccurately informed potential jurors, “When police officers arrived at the house with a search warrant on March 16, none of the players would cooperate with the investigation.” Moreover, added the editorial board, it was “outrageous that not a single person who was in the house felt compelled to step forward and tell the truth about what happened.” Of course, they had done so. They just hadn’t told the “truth” the H-S so desperately wanted to hear.

7.) Marc Fisher, “Wolves in Blazers and Khakis,” Washington Post, July 13, 2006. This piece was the worst of a subsection of case op-eds—those that used the most widely publicized bar squabble in modern American history to engage in character assassination against Collin Finnerty. Fisher regaled in mocking Finnerty’s friends, whose “stories matched up so prettily as they trooped up onto the witness stand to defend their boy, Collin Finnerty.” Naturally, Fisher has ceased commenting on Duke matters as the lacrosse case upon which he based his assumptions collapsed.

6.) Selena Roberts, “When Peer Pressure, Not a Conscience, Is Your Guide,” New York Times, March 31, 2006. The Roberts piece exposed to the world that a New York Times columnist believed that a search warrant was actually a “court document” that purported to contain a finding of fact. (The Times ran a brief correction six days later.) “Something happened,” proclaimed Roberts, while none of the players “have come forward to reveal an eyewitness account.” (The Times didn’t run a correction on this error of fact.) Roberts joined the H-S in hailing the potbangers for their “heartening” actions, and detected on the lacrosse team “a desire for teammates to exploit the vulnerable without heeding a conscience.” For good measure, Times’ public editor Byron Calame a few weeks later suggested that even if the case collapsed, “The Times should be prepared to continue covering what is done about the racial-insult allegations.” So, the paper needed to focus on not the issue of prosecutorial misconduct but instead the actions of the (one) lacrosse player who used a racial slur in response to Kim Roberts’ racial taunts. Talk about misplaced priorities.

5.) Josh Perlin, “Seligmann Not Worth Hassle,” Cornell Daily Sun, March 1, 2007. In a column that was an embarrassment to college journalism, Perlin asserted that because he was “tired” of the case, Brown and other Ivy League institutions shouldn’t consider transfer applications from Reade Seligmann.

4.) Hal Crowther, “Sympathy for the Devils?,” Indy, June 28, 2006. An astute observer of the case suggested that this column deserved a higher ranking, and he might be correct. The column oozed hatred for the lacrosse players, whom Crowther termed “subhuman,” and suggested that those who criticized Mike Nifong’s misconduct needed to “catch a glimpse of your inner racist in the mirror.” This article also featured the outrageous photo of Peter Wood in front of the lacrosse field; the History professor used his interview to appear to slander one of his former students, Reade Seligmann.

3.) Amanda Marcotte, Airbrushed Duke Post, Pandagon, January 21, 2007. John Edwards’ former campaign blogger provided some of the ugliest rhetoric on the case of any figure who had access to mainstream readers. Then, when she got criticized, she erased the post and negative comments in the thread.

2.) Harvey Araton, “At Duke, Freedom of Speech Seems Selective,” New York Times, May 26, 2006. The Duke women’s lacrosse players wearing armbands expressing solidarity with those targeted by Mike Nifong enraged several columnists. Araton ranted at how the “lacrosse gals, 30 of 31 of whom are white, are apparently free to martyr their male lax mates,” and wondered how “cross-team friendship and university pride [could] negate common sense at a college as difficult to gain admission to as Duke,” with the women’s players “staking their own reputations” on the case’s outcome. If so, their reputations have been wholly vindicated—unlike that of Araton and his colleagues at the Times.

1.) Andrew Cohen, “The Media Rush to Duke’s Defense,” washingtonpost.com, June 27, 2006. Cohen’s insinuation that prosecutorial misconduct can be forgiven depending on the race, class, or gender of the defendants strikes at the heart of the system’s integrity. Demonstrating his own journalistic credentials, Cohen got Bob Ekstrand’s name wrong no fewer than six times, but he nonetheless took to task the media, complaining that “there is no balanced coverage in the Duke case. There is just one defense-themed story after another.” (Apparently we needed more stories sympathizing with prosecutors who withhold exculpatory DNA evidence or instruct police to violate their own procedures; Cohen later on would become about the only person outside Mike Nifong's office to praise the Duff Wilson August New York Times piece.) The reason for this imbalance, according to Cohen? “Race and money and access to the media have a lot to do with it.”

Cohen concluded, “We haven’t seen all of the evidence, haven’t examined all of the testimony; haven’t had the privilege of seeing the case unfold at trial the way it is supposed to.” In Cohen’s mind, we needed to have the “privilege” of a trial in the highest-profile case of prosecutorial misconduct in modern American history. This distorted vision of the justice system makes Cohen’s the worst of any op-ed column published on the case.