NY Times, Tawana Brawley and Chrystal Mangum

It is now day eight and the NY Times remains silent on the Duke3 while it continues to hyperventilate over the lamentable Alberto Gonzales. The lockjaw down on 43rd Street stands sin sharp contrast to the paper's vigilance on a similar hoax in New York twenty years ago. In 1987, the Times unleashed its considerable resources to determine that Tawana Brawley had perpetrated a hoax when she claimed that three white men had abducted and raped her.

Now circle back to the present and take a hard look at the paper's behavior with Chrystal Mangum and Mike Nifong down in Durham over the past year. Unlike in the Brawley case, where the Times unleashed an armada of good experienced reporters whose work on the case played a significant role in unmasking the Brawley fiction, in the Duke hoax the Times assigned a reporter to this controversial case who was best left covering the fun and games on the sports page.

Duff Wilson was clearly out of his depth and, as a result, embarrassed himself and his employer in August with a 5,600 word whitewash of Nifong's prosecutorial abuse. In doing this, Wilson and the Times became part of the politically correct amen chorus on the Duke campus that led the lynch mob's rush to convict the three students before any evidence of a crime was even in.

Unlike the Times' original Tawana team, Duff Wilson will not be writing any best seller about the Duke case. The only decent thing left for the paper of wreckage to do, is to write the damn mea culpa, finally stand up for the things that liberals are supposed to stand up for-you know, due process, innocent until proven guilty, the rights of the accused over the abuse of state power-and if they don't than we'll know just how far the institution has fallen; farther than the revenues that the red ink stained wretches are witnessing today.