Mangum, Murder, and the Los Angeles Times

The 2^nd-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.