Media message: camera operator for The Abrams Report films Butch Williams, center, and Kerry Sutton, right, lawyers representing some members of the lacrosse team

Megan Morr

Controversy, not committee studies, turned the media focus on Duke. On a single day in late March, more than 550 news outlets featured some version of the story, headlined on The New York Times' front page, "Rape Allegation Against Athletes Is Roiling Duke." By mid-April, a Web search produced 2.3 million hits under the heading "Duke Lacrosse Scandal."

There was nonstop coverage on television and radio networks and in newspapers and news magazines around the country--including a cover story in Newsweek (with the cover line, "Sex, Lies & Duke"), a long segment on Nightline on ABC, an entire hour of Larry King Live on CNN, and even The Daily Show's biting look at the mindlessness of the media onslaught. The online world offered at least one blog, "Justice 4 Two Sisters," newly created as a "watchdog, information hub, and activism website" devoted to the alleged victim. Blogs centered on sports, politics, feminism, and race continued to feed off the episode, as did blogs ranging in tone from the Huffington Post to Duke New Sense, driven by the writing of conservative Duke students. Talk radio's Rush Limbaugh weighed in; so did National Public Radio's Frank Deford.

For weeks, a half-dozen TV satellite trucks took over a good part of the Bryan Center parking lot. More than a dozen TV cameras documented an interfaith vigil in front of the Chapel; some reporters planted themselves in the midst of admissions tour groups. The president of the student government and the editor of The Chronicle were interviewed separately by some twenty media outlets. The local ABC affiliate ran a banner on its website showing lacrosse equipment, the Duke Blue Devil logo, and, in huge letters, the words "Rape Investigation."

Inevitably, many of the media accounts have painted a picture that contributes to gripping storytelling even as they overlook the deep complexities of reality. The head of the Durham Chamber of Commerce lamented, "Rich white school, poor black town, makes a better story than the complexities of the real story, which is diverse school, diverse town." As Brodhead put it in response to a question following his "State of the University" address over Reunions Weekend in late April, the early stories seemed to be "written in the key of hysteria. They are all written to inspire hysteria, and they teach the lesson that hysteria breeds extraordinary mental simplifications: Every student at Duke was filthy rich, right? At a school where more than 40 percent of the students are on financial aid, and the average grant from the university is $25,000 of financial aid. Every student at Duke is a white preppy, right? And every person in Durham is a penniless black person. You know, there are such people at Duke, and there are such people in Durham--and it's important to remember it--but the truth is, it just teaches you that in the world of passion is the world where people just reach for any old stereotype."

Brodhead, in his reunion remarks, said a conversation that had touched him most profoundly was with the head of the North Carolina NAACP, who told him, "'If you ever want someone to come and stand by you and talk about the damage that can be done by prejudging, by judging people because of a group they belong to and some theory you have of that group rather than actual evidence, you come to me.'" Brodhead added. "And actually, there has been so much prejudgment in this case. It has been a powerful lesson in how deep the passions of prejudice run, all kinds of prejudice--prejudices against athletes, prejudices against the South, have been very, very visible in the Northern media all through this."

Commentators on media practices observed that this was the perfect story, with elements of dramatic tension and themes that captivate American society. "Here is the embodiment of men acting badly," wrote columnist Mike Lopresti in USA Today. "Or maybe it's alcohol abuse. Possibly the arrogance of the privileged. Or jocks beyond control. It is race. It is sex. It is class. It is gender. Enough inflammable material there to start an inferno."

If not outright inflammable, some of the media coverage, close to home and beyond, hasn't been a model of clarity. One opinion column in The Chronicle declared that, in the immediate wake of the incident, the lacrosse team had gathered at an off-campus bar and boisterously expressed contempt for the criticism directed at them. That observation has since been called into question--but has still reverberated through the outside media.

The New York Times, which published more than twenty related stories and five corrections between first word of the incident and the subsequent indictments, reported that there was never a review of the lacrosse team's off-field problems. A later account in the same newspaper quoted Tallman Trask III, the university's executive vice president, as saying that he had reviewed that record a year ago. In a Sunday Times op-ed column, writer Allan Gurganus characterized Duke as a campus increasingly populated by richer and richer students; he also referred to the university's practice of housing athletes together. In fact, the university has become more diverse in socio-economic terms as well as in other respects, and it doesn't cluster athletes. At the reunion forum, Brodhead noted wryly, "Durham was referred to as a middle-class town in The New York Times the other day; this is astonishing progress."

The media correspondent for National Public Radio, David Folkenflik, says the press pile-up is to be expected. For three years in the early 1990s, Folkenflik was the Duke-beat reporter for the Durham Herald-Sun. More than a decade ago, he points out, he was writing about the university's so-called "work hard, play hard" culture and about questions of whether that culture was undermining intellectual life and the ability to prize independent thinking. "Duke is a place of privilege," he says. "There are people in Durham who do not make as much money as it costs to attend Duke for one year. That's true of every major private university and its community. But Duke is not every university."

Duke's standing, Folkenflik and others observe, makes it a logical target of media scrutiny. The university has long highlighted the exceptional quality of its athletics program, notably the high graduation rate for its athletes. "Duke has not been shy about trading on that image," Folkenflik says. So when something is seemingly awry in the conduct of Duke athletes, attention will be paid.

Its compelling content notwithstanding, Folkenflik says the story has been over-covered. "There is a relentlessness to it, and it has become grist for the tabloid mill. There are real issues at play--layers and layers of issues--and competing narratives. But that isn't to say that Duke should be undigested meat for cable TV to chew on night after night, when those reports are detailing non-events and are not really adding knowledge to the story."

March 25 Candlelight vigil held at 610 N. Buchanan and another house rented by lacrosse players.

Chris Hildreth

The facts of the story continue to be confusing, and reactions on campus reflect the different ways the story is read. "The idea of hiring strippers, the drinking and boorish behavior, is upsetting, embarrassing. And that's clearly one thing that you've seen a strong reaction to," says Paul Haagen, a Duke law professor and chair of the Academic Council, the faculty senate. "And, of course, all of that is against the background that something very bad could have happened. In addition, the allegation of racial epithets has really upset people. Is our education so ineffective that this kind of behavior is something we would see in our students? Have we tolerated be-havior that would cause people to believe they can treat other people without respect? These kinds of anxieties or anguish are driving a lot of people's responses."

"There is a lot of pain associated with these revelations," Haagen continues. "And people want the pain to go away. People who believe we have tolerated it for too long are fearful that it will be tolerated in the future, whatever the 'it' is that they've identified." Of course, he adds, "some people are deeply distrustful of any authority and always believe that there is timidity and non-seriousness" in any institutional response--even though that response is guided by values and imperatives that sometimes can be competing. "So they imagine the worst and interpret every statement of 'we need to gather information' as a kind of prevarication in the face of things which certainly are known. Some people believe this is the moment to address things, and, therefore, we must mobilize ourselves to address deep and underlying issues. Some people, I think, recognize that there is a vulnerability and that they can push a particular issue now."

Many of the issues surrounding the case reflect the vexing mix of race and class. (Forty-six of the forty-seven lacrosse players are white.) In a candidates' debate, District Attorney Michael B. Nifong, who was running for election after his appointment to serve out an unexpired term, said, "The reason that I took this case says something about Durham that I'm not going to let be said." He added, "I'm not going to allow Durham's view in the minds of the world to be a bunch of lacrosse players at Duke raping a black girl from Durham." After the indictments of the two players, widespread media reports accented the fact that both are products of wealthy New York suburbs. As The News & Observer put it, "They came from a world of hushed golf greens and suburban homes with price tags that cross the million-dollar line."