It was the best of The Times, it was the worst of The Times.
Often regarded as a national newspaper of record, The New York Times has recently come under fire for its coverage of the Duke lacrosse case. In the year since the story first broke, The Times has been criticized for printing news with a slant favoring Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong and for drawing out the amalgam of sex, race and class issues that contributed to the case's prominent position in the national spotlight.
"I think The Times' coverage was heartbreaking," said Daniel Okrent, who served as the first public editor of The Times from October 2003 to May 2005. "I understand why they jumped on the story when they did, but it showed everything that's wrong with American journalism."
The newspaper began its coverage of the case last year with a front-page article March 29, and continued to publish more than 20 articles within the next two weeks and more than 100 articles to date.
"Here was a story that fit a template that they recognized and thought was a productive one... a story about privilege, a story about town and gown, a story about how race is handled in America," said Jack Shafer, editor at large for Slate.com and author of several articles criticizing The Times' coverage of the case.
After the March 29 article, The Times maintained coverage on the sports pages and inside news pages until a highly criticized 5,600-word article by Duff Wilson and Jonathan Glater ran Aug. 25 as The Times' lead story.
In an August article for Slate.com Stuart Taylor, a columnist for the National Journal and a former Times reporter, said Wilson and Glater's piece "highlights every superficial incriminating piece of evidence in the case, selectively omits important exculpatory evidence and reports hotly disputed statements... as if they were established facts."
He also criticized the article for relying heavily for evidence on a 33-page report by Sgt. Mark Gottlieb and three pages of handwritten notes that had been made exclusive to The Times. Gottlieb wrote the notes after the initial investigation and told defense lawyers he was "relying... on his memory" to write a chronological report of the investigation, The Times reported.
"[It] was the worst single piece of journalism I've ever seen in long form in a newspaper," Taylor said in an interview with The Chronicle. He added that many of the paper's articles-most of which were written by Wilson-were pro-Nifong and downplayed much of the defense's evidence.
"About the time Nifong dropped the rape charges [Dec. 22], they brought in a more serious reporter, and their coverage began to sound more like a newspaper and less like a propaganda organ for a transparently abusive prosecutor," Taylor added.
Okrent also said The Times' coverage began to shift with a Dec. 23 article, which was co-written by Wilson and David Barstow.
"Once I saw David Barstow's name on it, I thought, now they're going to try to make up for it because David Barstow is their gold standard," Okrent said. "It was, 'Let's bring in the one guy who will get everything absolutely right.'"
He added, however, that editors-and not writers-are ultimately responsible for the articles in the newspaper and that editorial decisions about article assignments and placements were at fault for propelling the story.
"If they had run the story on A-11 or A-15 on the second story, I'd say the majority of the American public would never have heard about it," Okrent said.
Times editors have defended their stance, however, saying that the front-page placement of several of the articles was necessary.
"The soundness of the news judgment reflected in the paper's performance so far deserves a decent grade," Byron Calame, public editor for The Times, wrote in a column April 23, 2006. "The coverage has been basically fair, I think, with a few miscues mainly related to the placement and the space given articles."
Calame wrote that running the article on the front page March 29 was "controversial, but warranted" and that the articles shed light on "important issues of race and class at a prestigious university" that were brought to light by the case, whether or not the allegations were to hold true.
"The article's restrained one-column headline below the fold on Page 1 placed it gently before Times readers who may not visit the sports section regularly," he wrote. "I think The Times performed a service in alerting a broader audience to an important story."
A national story
But because of The Times' broad audience and established reputation, it was the paper's attention to the case that exploded the story into a nationwide sensation, Shafer said.
The story remained in The Times' sports department until mid-April 2006, covered both in columns and sports articles, before the editors made a decision to approach it as a national news story instead.
"Not that many rape stories make Page 1 of The New York Times," Shafer said. "When The Times decides such a story rises to national prominence, the onus is on them to explain why this is a national news story. The Times sets the national news agenda."
But The Times' news agenda appeared to support a moral agenda as well, advocating societal lessons emerging from the issues of race, sex and class issues brought to light in the case's early development, said KC Johnson, author of the "Durham-In-Wonderland" blog that attracted national attention for its coverage of the case.
"The best adjective to describe the news coverage of The Times is 'duplicitous,'" Johnson said. "The news coverage in March and early April should be faulted for accepting the Nifong line basically hook, line and sinker and making a morality tale of the case, drawing broad lessons of college athletes at the time when the facts of the case were really unclear."
Times sports columnists Selena Roberts and Harvey Araton-who began writing about the story early in the case's development-were also widely blamed for rushing to judgment, printing in their opinion pieces what Taylor called "vicious, hate-filled attacks on the lacrosse players," and what Johnson described in his blog as "outrageous writings."
But even as criticisms of The Times' coverage began to emerge, the paper continued to provide coverage in the same vein.
"A lot of people think The New York Times is a bible of what really happened," Taylor said. "I think an awful lot of people have been misled by The New York Times coverage and either didn't pay attention to what critics were saying or shrugged it off-'Who am I going to believe, The New York Times or some no-name critic in the blogosphere?'"
John Burness, Duke senior vice president for government relations and public affairs, said The Times' shifting of the story from the sports desk to the news desk-which he said appeared to come later than at other national papers-may have contributed to the early problems in The Times' coverage.
"I think the paper also had difficulty because they had trouble figuring out what the story was," he said. "For the first few weeks they had sports reporters, then education reporters, then investigative reporters.... It was just very frustrating because you would hope that if The Times got it right it would set a standard for others."
Burness added that The Times' op-eds and news articles also contained many factual errors that misrepresented the University.
"There was one two-week period where we asked for about 10 corrections in The Times and probably got about five," he said. "We should have gotten 10."
Response to criticism
Despite the persistent criticism from other journalists, the blogosphere and the general public, The Times continued to stand behind its coverage and defend its decisions throughout the case's development.
In a second column published this Sunday in The Times-one year after his first column was printed-Calame reassessed the newspaper's coverage, again maintaining its overall fairness but also acknowledging problems.
"I found that the past year's articles generally reported both sides, and that most flaws flowed from journalistic lapses rather than ideological bias," Calame wrote.
He also addressed the criticized August article, saying that based on the evidence it presented and on Gottlieb's report, the article was "significantly less skeptical" than some previous articles. Calame said The Times nonetheless concluded in the article that there was "a body of evidence" to take Nifong's case to trial.
"This overstated summary was a major flaw in the article that has overshadowed other worthwhile aspects of the story," Calame wrote in the column.
He also cited an e-mail from Times Executive Editor Bill Keller, who wrote that the August article presented Nifong's evidence but also raised doubts about his case.
"At the time, we were trying to give sufficient prominence to what [Wilson] had extracted with some difficulty-the evidence Nifong claimed justified his pursuit of the case-because that was actual new information," Keller wrote. "At the same time we did not want to underplay the major holes in the case... and we did not want to treat our new material unskeptically, because there were serious questions about how reliable that evidence was."
Okrent said common journalistic protocol includes writing "rowback" articles, in which the newspaper corrects the record on an issue they presented inaccurately without necessarily acknowledging the mistake.
He, along with other critics, said, however, that The Times presented too much faulty information before any sort of rowback was published, even then not addressing its alleged misrepresentation of the case.
"How do you elegantly say, 'Whoops, we erred here?'" Shafer said. "I still think The Times has not acknowledged the role it played in sensationalizing its story.... You don't need to put on the hairshirt and run around and get everyone to accept an apology-I'm talking about correcting the record and getting the story better, righter, straighter."
In an Oct. 16 "Talk to the Newsroom" column online, Craig Whitney, Times assistant managing editor and standards editor, also defended Wilson and Glater's piece, saying that the article reported extensively on all the evidence presented. He also said The Times' overall coverage "has had its flaws" but that it has not been unfair or inaccurate.
"One test of it is how this record would look to a reader after the case is closed," Whitney wrote. "I believe that taken as a whole it would look fair and balanced to an unbiased reader, no matter what the outcome."
And as the case closed earlier this month, critics said the coverage became more balanced and responsible overall, but that the initial articles had already miscast the story in the minds of the paper's readership.
"If and when The Times does a big story on what went wrong in the Duke case, unless they're a part of the story, unless they report on themselves, it will be an incomplete story," Okrent said.
Times editors referred questions to Calame and Whitney's columns.
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