A feature in New York Magazine examines the coverage of the Duke-lacrosse team case by the New York Times. It's a great read. Talk about agenda journalism run amok. Here writer Kurt Andersen compares that treatment with professor/blogger K. C. Johnson's coverage of the case:
In the movie, Tom Hanks would play K. C. Johnson. He’s the most impressive of the “bloggers who have closely followed the case,†in the Times’ tacitly pejorative construction. But Johnson is the Platonic ideal of the species—passionate but committed to rigor and facts and fairness, a tenured professor of U.S. history (at Brooklyn College), a 38-year-old vegetarian who lives alone in a one-bedroom Bay Ridge apartment and does pretty much nothing but study, teach, run, and write.Posted by dan at February 8, 2007 2:28 AMJohnson has no connection to Duke. (His B.A. and Ph.D. are from the Harvard of the Northeast.) His attention was grabbed in April by the “deeply disturbing†public comments of Duke faculty that righteously indulged in invidious stereotypes and assumed the lacrosse players’ guilt. “One area that the academy, especially since McCarthyism, is supposed to stand up is cases where due process is denied,†he says.
He usually posts at least once a day—not standard autoblog rim shots, but carefully argued, deeply researched essays running 1,000 words or more. “I need to ensure that it meets what I consider to be an acceptable level of academic quality.†He has traveled to Durham several times. When he wanted to find out if Nifong’s unfair photo lineups were standard provincial practice—they’re not—he spent days talking to fifteen North Carolina police departments and prosecutors.
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For the past few years, I’ve tended to roll my eyes when people default to rants about the blindered oafishness or various biases of “the mainstream media†in general and the Times in particular. At the same time, I’ve nodded when people gush about the blogosphere as a valuable check on and supplement to the MSM—but I’ve never entirely bought it. Having waded deep into this Duke mess the last weeks, baffled by the Times’ pose of objectivity and indispensably guided by Johnson’s blog, I’m becoming a believer.