A Sorry Story, With Apology Yet to Come

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 16, 2007

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.

That miscarriage of justice was aided, abetted and amplified by media that unfairly turned the men into a national symbol of pampered, out-of-control student-athletes. Prosecutor Mike Nifong might lose his law license over the botched case, but the media never get disbarred.

Imus repeatedly apologized for calling the Rutgers women "nappy-headed hos," and a national uproar prompted CBS Radio and NBC News to pull the plug on his program. But where is the apology to David Evans, Collin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann from news organizations that launched a classic feeding frenzy based on one woman's shaky allegations? Even Nifong has said he is sorry.

The combination of race, crime, sports and a blue-chip university proved irresistible for a business that thrives on creating national soap operas. Did the indictments, as the team's lacrosse season was canceled, have to be covered? Of course. But media outlets framed the story as one of privilege vs. poverty, black vs. white, athletes above the law -- if, of course, it happened.

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.

Once discrepancies surfaced in the accuser's account, some local and national outlets did a good job of bird-dogging the case. But by then the presumption of innocence had virtually vanished.

The three players were not choir boys -- the team had, after all, invited a pair of strippers to a midnight party -- but they hardly deserved the national scorn of being loudly trumpeted as accused rapists.

The accuser got to make her charges from behind a curtain of anonymity, which is entirely proper in sexual assault cases. But I'm not so sure the media should continue to shield her now that investigators have determined her to be a liar. The New York Post, Washington Times, and Raleigh News & Observer have all identified the woman.

What Imus said was indefensible, and he lost his job in part because passionate complaints by African Americans at CBS and NBC tipped the scales at those networks. And it is true that he had a history of making insensitive cracks, and that the politicians and journalists who appeared on his show, including me, were too willing to look the other way.

Back in 1996, I asked Sens. John Kerry, Chris Dodd and Bill Bradley why they went on a program that was airing a song parody about how Hillary Clinton "fornicates," "menstruates" and "urinates," with the refrain: "That's why the first lady is a tramp." All said they enjoyed the bantering format that gave them plenty of time to talk about issues. And the show drew millions of listeners for a reason.

The highbrow side of "Imus in the Morning" was brushed aside in the stampede to drive him from the public square, but perhaps it's only fair that a man who chatted with presidential candidates and network anchors be held to a higher standard than all the schlock jocks. I do not believe Imus is a bigot -- not a man who raised millions for cancer-stricken kids of all races to stay at his New Mexico ranch -- any more than I believe he was anti-Semitic because he once made tasteless cracks about my being Jewish. I don't know him off the air, but I know as a listener that insult humor was his stock in trade. I heard worse growing up on the streets of Brooklyn, where Don Rickles was a role model. I always made the distinction that Imus was operating out of humor, not malice. In retrospect, I failed to appreciate how the cruder bits sounded to those who were not part of the white guys' club.

Imus's locker-room shtick was always risky, and unfortunately he kept straying over the line until, 12 days ago, he obliterated it. Calling politicians and journalists weasels and worms is fine, but not picking on young student-athletes who overcame obstacles to play for a national championship.

We can argue about whether he should have been given another chance -- Mel Gibson is still making movies, isn't he? -- but Imus was probably doomed when the national debate morphed into an argument over indecency and meanness in broadcasting. He became the symbol of all that was wrong with today's toxic popular culture.

But what about the radio hosts who demean others out of anger or ideology, not misguided humor? Michael Savage was also fired by MSNBC after telling a gay caller that he should "get AIDS and die," but he is now on 370 radio stations. He once called the Million Mom March for gun control the "million dyke march." On his Web site, under "Savage Rap Lyrics," is a song that begins, "If she's got 10 toes, she's a ho."

And that slang word for whore comes, of course, from the thriving rap industry. "Imus should only be fired when the black artists who make millions of dollars rapping about black bitches and hos lose their recording contracts," civil rights lawyer Constance Rice wrote in the Los Angeles Times. "Black leaders should denounce Imus and boycott him and call for his head only after they do the same for the misogynist artists with whom they have shared stages, magazine covers and awards shows."

It would be a welcome development if the national uproar over Imus turned into a sustained examination of others who pollute the airwaves. But the media's attention span is such that they will soon be chasing some new scandal, dropping the decency crusade as quickly as they abandoned the Duke case once the racial story line they had pushed collapsed under the weight of the facts.

Coming Clean

Now it can be told: Matt Cooper thought that Time magazine's strategy in the Valerie Plame leak investigation was "insane." He was unhappy when his lawyer wanted to simultaneously represent I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the man whose identity Cooper was risking jail to protect. And Judith Miller got on his nerves.

Cooper, who has left Time, is now Washington bureau chief for Portfolio, the glossy business magazine from Conde Nast that makes its debut today. The launch is cloaked in secrecy, although word has leaked that Tom Wolfe is writing about hedge funds. But I have penetrated the veil, obtaining the Cooper piece from sources I would go to jail to keep secret -- maybe.

Cooper says he realized early on that he would probably lose the subpoena battle over his refusal to testify about his 2003 discussions regarding Plame with White House aides Libby and Karl Rove. But Time rejected Cooper's plea to compromise by seeking waivers of confidentiality from the officials. "Behind the scenes I desperately wanted to make a deal that could get us out of this mess," he writes.

Norman Pearlstine, then Time Inc.'s editor in chief, decided to hire conservative lawyer Ted Olson. But Cooper's opinion of the former solicitor general declined when Olson asked if he could also represent Libby, which Cooper saw as a conflict since "Libby's defense ultimately involved my word against his." Olson quickly backed off.

Cooper was rankled that "my reporting was becoming linked to Miller's flawed work." He says the then-New York Times reporter, who wound up spending 85 days in jail, "had become the poster girl for leading the country into war." He recalls Miller using a prohibited cellphone in court to dial what she called "my guys in Iraq," the Army unit with which she had been embedded.

Despite Cooper's desire to reach a settlement with the special prosecutor over his testimony, Time's then-managing editor, Jim Kelly, argued that incarceration was unlikely. "It was easier for me to say some of this stuff because I was never heading for jail," Kelly says in the piece. Cooper avoided imprisonment with a last-minute compromise.

Why dredge this up now? "I guess it was cathartic for me to just put it down," Cooper says in an interview. "And I'd already done the reporting."