Wouldn't it have been nice if the media had been scrutinized and criticized ...

[L Buff]

... like this during our "scandal"?

More than a dozen major newspapers and magazines have rushed in recent weeks to publish reviews heaping praise on what we have demonstrated -- and will demonstrate again below -- to be a guilt-presuming, fact-challenged new book about the Duke lacrosse rape fraud of 2006.

Meanwhile, author William D. Cohan has ratcheted up his wild claims and misleading innuendoes during at least 10 broadcast and print interviews about the book, even, in some cases, after proof of their falsity had been published by us and others.

Most of the interviewers have been as fawning as most of the reviewers, leaving unchallenged Cohan's evidence-free innuendoes that Duke lacrosse players did something terrible on the night in question.

The notable exception was Jon Stewart's interview of Cohan this week on “The Daily Show.” Stewart repeatedly cut short -- with observations such as "in this case they were exonerated" -- Cohan's efforts to slime the lacrosse players.

All this despite the fact that the 621-page book, “The Price of Silence: The Duke Lacrosse Scandal, the Power of the Elite, and the Corruption of Our Great Universities,” adds not a single scrap of new evidence that undermines the well-founded consensus that -- as North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper found in April 2007 -- no Duke lacrosse player committed any crime against the mentally imbalanced accuser, Crystal Mangum.

 

[MtnBuff]

If anyone in our administration had the courage at the time to question the witch hunt mentality that was going on there would have been more opportunity.

As it was they threw Barnett and especially the players under the bus by either staying silent or in fact and action aiding in the groundless character assassination and pile on mentality.

 

[GoBuffs08]

I for one am thankful for our scandal. Without it I would have never learned that c*nt is a term of endearment. Thanks Betsy!

 

[DBT]

Bain of our existence has made a career, apparently, of filing civil suits in these kinds of cases.

 

[sackman]

Betsy was totally unprepared for what happened. She was completely out of her league and it showed. We were doomed by our own ineptitude from the office of the President all the way down to the AD. Nobody handled that right.

 

[Darian3Hagan]

And we still haven't learned from our PR mistakes.