The full glare of the media spotlight
Can get justice done, says Steve Gilliard:
It may seem like more noise, but without a national focus, justice can be denied. Since the earliest days of the Republic, crime has been news.
Without the good name and reputation of Duke on the line, do you think this would have made it this far? It certainly wouldn’t have before the 1970’s. There is a reason some cases merit national attention, despite your discomfort. Duke, one of the wealthiest schools in the US, has a good public reputation.
Now, 1 in 20 college women are raped. I think the ONLY reason this is news is because the woman accuser was older, with a family, and not a Duke student. If this had been a white Duke coed, the intimidation factor to keep her silent would have been intense, more than she could bear. A quiet withdrawal and a new school is what you can expect, if she just doesn’t suffer in silence until she sees a shrink years later.
This is news because they couldn’t isolate and pressure her, make her doubt what happened. The usual pressure rape victims can face when they know their attacker.
Isn’t fair to the accuser? Without national attention and local support, the pressure would have been intense on the DA to drop the case. Rape cases are hard to prove, hard to get witnesses for, and everyone wants them to go away.
What national attention can do is level the playing field. Even a Da’s office can be overwhelmed by rich kids and their lawyers. With press attention and public interest, the accuser is more likely to be heard.
One of the thing that drives me nuts about the left is the assumption that news kills other news. It doesn’t. People think “wow, if there wasn’t the Duke rape trial, people would care about Iran”. It doesn’t work like that and never has. Crime is newsworthy and always has been. The Lindburgh Kidnapping didn’t stop people caring about Hitler, Bonnie and Clyde didn’t stop people concerned about the New Deal, and when the dockworkers beat the crap out of the Nazis in the streets of New York, the Spanish Civil War still made the news.