Day Five: No Redemption in Sight

It is now day five and the paper of record remains silent on the attempt to railroad three Duke lacrosse players for their unforgivable race and class status. KC Johnson blogs on the Times' role in the case this morning and titles his post: "Redeeming the Times."

From our view here it would be hard to see how the paper could manage even a modicum of redemption, short of doing the kind of soul-searching it did after the Jason Blair fiasco. As Newsweek reports in this week's issue, the Duff Wilson story in August, the one where he claimed that there was a "body of evidence" that gave credence to the DA's crusade, gave Mike Nifong a boost.

Compare the silence of the paper with his sustained outrage over the "politicizing" of justice with the flap over the US Attorneys. Here there is no evidence of any underlying crime but the need to go after the Bush administration drives a continual barrage of front page coverage. Imagine if Mike Nifong had been a Bush appointee.

On the Duke case-editorial silence and no attempt to determine how one DA could undertake such an obstruction of justice with the active support and encouragement of academic schmucks and their media sycophants. The one redeeming reporter at the Times is its suburban columnist Peter Applebome who did his second decent piece on the subject in ye$terday's paper. The rest of the bunch deserve all of our opprobrium for the rank hypocrisy that creates a stench all up and down 43rd Street.