60 Minutes Drops the Ball – Where Duke Has Failed in the Lacrosse Controversy
When you get beyond 60 Minutes’ correspondent Ed Bradley’s syrupy genuflection to Duke University over what he describes as a travesty of justice blanketing three now infamous men’s lacrosse players, the obvious question is how can 60 Minutes, the icon of TV news for more than a generation, have missed the point so badly in its October 15, 2006, story on the Duke lacrosse scandal?
Bradley, one of the top TV journalists of the last decade-plus, was enamored of his own 60 Minutes effort, back-slapping his team by noting the show had reviewed thousands of documents of evidence and landed one of two exotic dancers on the night in question to prepare the lengthy piece. Bradley and his team concluded, and I have no qualms with their reportage or unequivocal findings, that the 27-year-old dancer who accused the three men of rape was fabricating her story. They suggest the evidence is clear, and no one reasonable is likely to draw any other conclusion. Often in criminal proceedings witnesses are mistaken, the evidence trail broken or people simply lie.
60 Minutes concluded it was the latter, but the TV news magazine missed the point in the Duke story. The guilt or innocence of the three Duke lacrosse players is not the relevant point. The indelible question not asked by 60 Minutes is has Duke University created or fostered an environment that is inhospitable to women or people or color? The day of the lacrosse party, which occurred in an aged ranch house across the street from the storied campus, did the white Duke players – before calling an escort service and ordering up two dancers for a midnight show – decide they wanted African American females? Apparently so. Does that trouble anyone on the Durham campus besides people of color?
Does the Duke leadership today question why the nationally ranked lacrosse team found sport in paying African American women to dance, scantily attired, in a sea of young men, most from affluent families scattered up and down the East Coast? Is the old South alive and well at Duke, or is the prestigious institution more socially progressive than now appears?
60 Minutes sidestepped these germane issues, and it is troubling that the storyline continues to focus solely on the guilt or innocence of these young men. Duke dropped the ball in using the lacrosse incident as a teachable moment, and 60 Minutes exacerbated their narrow-minded approach with surprising aplomb.
-- Christopher Simpson