Monday, April 16, 2007
Rutgers basketball and Duke lacrosse
Howard Kurtz has a thing or two to say about the media's crashing silence over the exoneration of the Duke lacrosse defendants:
Everyone, including Don Imus, agrees that the remarkable women of the Rutgers basketball team were unfairly maligned by his racial slur.
But what about the living hell visited on three young men from the Duke lacrosse team? In all the coverage of the sexual assault charges that were finally dropped last week, very few have talked about how the media slimed them....
Television showed the homes of the players' parents. Newsweek put two of the defendants' mug shots on the cover. Sometimes the word "alleged" was dropped in the process. "I'm so glad they didn't miss a lacrosse game over a little thing like gang rape," Headline News host Nancy Grace said.
Read the whole thing.
I think that one of the reasons why the Duke rape case has caused such tension in the chattering classes is that it undermines the patently false idea that "rape victims don't lie." That quaint notion -- cherished among feminists of a certain bent and, frankly, all people of good will -- fractured at the foundation during the Clinton years when Juanita Brodderick accused feminism's favorite president of having raped her in 1978. Suddenly, and for a moment, the testimony of rape victims was less certainly true. However, notwithstanding that low point in presidential popular culture we remain very reluctant to question the claims of alleged victims of rape, which reluctance explains why the media was so willing to pillory the Duke defendants and putatively liberal college students staged demonstrations demanding their punishment long before anybody knew the actual facts.
3 Comments:
By 
, at
Mon Apr 16, 06:31:00 PM:
The sticking point isn't that "rape victims don't lie," it is that "BLACK rape victims don't lie!"
The default position for all neocommunists has to be to side with the African American, no matter what the issue, and blame the white oppressor.
Watch the coverage of VT.Should the shooter prove to be a black or Muslim, the coverage will disappear. If the shooter is a white, Christian, say, hunter, we'll never hear the end of it.
"Asian looking" is sufficiently ambiguous to maintain coverage.
The shooter will get Anna Nicole coverage only as long as his racial/factual background meets the media's political bias.
By , at
Mon Apr 16, 08:21:00 PM:
Another way in which the two cases differ is that the Duke players hired a stripper for their party. Innocent and wronged as they were by the rape accusation, the fact remains that they were crass enough to hire a woman to strip naked at their party, and that's the deal killer right there when it comes to personal sympathy. Regardless of the legal outcome, they were still Behaving Badly.
The Rutgers basketball team, on the other hand, was minding their own business when they were insulted by Imus. They were not Behaving Badly.
By , at
Tue Apr 17, 07:46:00 AM:
Here in NZ, there have been several high profile false rape exposes. That got me checking a range of sites to see how common it was.
It's quite amazing, there's no apparent effort to hide the fact that in NZ and the US, authorities say flatly that false rape complaints run somewhere between 20-80% of all complaints. There sufficient good case studies, particularly in the US to prove the point. And, for God sakes, over 20% of rape convictions were proven wrong by DNA evidence in at least one US study.
Yet every time a false rape complaint is exposed, the media will dutifully trot out a female expert who will calmly explain that while regrettable, false rape complaints are only about 2% of all rape complaints.
A month later, the same media will report another exasperated cop saying that false complaints are wasting huge amounts of police time..
It's one of the biggest stories of the last 20 years, but one that fails to motivate the media or the public into doing something about it.
JC
