The 2nd-degree murder conviction of Crystal
Mangum has, understandably, brought the lacrosse case back into the news; if
Mangum hadn’t falsely accused three people of raping her, and if the local
prosecutor hadn’t violated all sorts of rules to keep her story alive, and if
dozens of Duke faculty hadn’t published an ad that among other things vouched
for Mangum’s credibility, it’s unlikely many people outside the Triangle would
care much about Mangum’s latest brush with the law, even if this time she
managed to kill Reginald Daye.
For the most part, reports on Mangum’s conviction responsibly recapitulated lacrosse case events, given space limitations.
Perhaps the best positioning of the case came from Georgia
Parke in the Duke Chronicle: “Mangum
previously gained notoriety after accusing three 2006 Duke lacrosse players of
raping and kidnapping her. The players were eventually found innocent and
Mangum's lawyer and former Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong was disbarred
for perjury and violating professional conduct.”
Even the normally biased Herald-Sun
chose a wholly
neutral, appropriately short, and accurate summary: “Mangum drew national headlines in
2006 when she falsely accused three members of the Duke University lacrosse
team of raping her at a party near East Campus.”
The BBC strayed a little closer to the politically correct
approach: eight of
the article’s fourteen paragraphs dealt not with Mangum’s killing of
Reginald Daye but instead with the lacrosse case. And some of that description
wasn’t accurate; the BBC claimed that Mike Nifong “resigned following an ethics trial investigating whether he had broken
rules of professional conduct in the case.” Of course, the ethics proceeding
did more than investigate—it found Nifong guilty on 27 of 32 counts, and
disbarred him.
Nonetheless, the BBC also conceded that the initial assumptions about “race, class and gender elements . . . were turned upside down [except among the Group of 88] when all charges against the three students were dropped by North Carolina’s attorney general, who cited significant inconsistencies between the evidence and various accounts given by Mangum.”
Then, almost as a
counterbalance to this overall record of fairness, there’s Soumya Karlamangla of the Los Angeles Times. Karlamangla, a Cal-Berkeley graduate,
came to the Times after serving as a
web producer intern and a health reporter intern for papers in San Francisco
and Portland—and as an “editorial intern” for The Nation. Nation editorial
interns, needless to say, tend not to be card-carrying members of the Federalist
Society.
In
what purported to be a straight news article, Karlamangla devoted 12
of her 15 paragraphs to the lacrosse case; Daye got one mention. And she framed
the article in a manner that suggested a desire to relitigate the collapse of
the race/class/gender narrative and even, to some extent, the facts of the case.
Her overall portrayal of the case read as if it came from a Group of 88 press
release: “The case captured the nation’s
attention, exposing racial and socioeconomic divides not just at the elite
university, but across the country.”
The race angle: Mangum “enrolled
at the historically black North Carolina Central University, and the three men accused
were white and attended a prestigious private university that was not
integrated until the 1960s.”
The class angle: “While Duke
typically attracts students more familiar to schools in the Northeast, its
Southern home in Durham is made up of mostly blue-collar workers. As cited
frequently by the media during the court proceedings, the yearly tuition at
Duke at the time was about $43,000, while the 2000 census put the the [sic: did
anyone edit this article?!] median household income in Durham at $41,160.”
Meanwhile, Karlamangla’s
description of the actual events of the lacrosse case leaned heavily on the give-and-take of court
filings or defendants’ statements, rather than on neutral inquiries such as the
AG’s investigation or Nifong’s ethics proceedings. Indeed, while she could find
space in her 15 paragraphs for Durham’s median household income 13 years before
the murder conviction that sparked the publication of the article, Karlamangla couldn’t bring herself to
mention that the State Bar conducted an ethics inquiry into Nifong’s conduct
and found him guilty of 27 of 32 counts. The piece merely mentioned that Nifong was
disbarred without explaining how or why.
Karlamangla then presented
events of the case with action verbs (emphasis added below) all but designed to
invite the reader to doubt: “The defense claimed”
Nifong ordered a procedurally improper photo array. (Did he?, a reader might
wonder.) “The Duke players maintained
they were innocent.” (Were they?, a reader might ask.) While Karlamangla
quoted from AG Cooper’s press conference, she pointedly did not include Cooper’s
statement that the players were innocent—easily the most newsworthy item from
his remarks. But the L.A. Times reporter
found space to pass along that even as evidence of her lies accumulated, Mangum
“insisted some sort of sexual assault had taken place.”
If Karlamangla wants
to publish an op-ed in The Nation defending the framing of the case by the Group of 88 and itsallies, she’s
obviously free to do so. But the L.A.
Times should be embarrassed for allowing her item to run as a news article.
