We have written previously about The Case of the Politically Incorrect DNA, the phony Duke rape case. It was such a transparently ridiculous case that we were surprised to the NYT trying to put some credibility into the prosecution. But such is the depths that the Times has apparently sunk to these days.

We knew that shoddy journalism was happening before our eyes when we saw that the Times anchored virtually its entire story on a “police report” written months after the incident. We didn’t have the energy to pursue this new low moment in the history of the NYT’s decline, but fortunately Stuart Taylor and others did:

[The NYT article] highlights every superficially incriminating piece of evidence in the case, selectively omits important exculpatory evidence, and reports hotly disputed statements by not-very-credible police officers and the mentally unstable accuser as if they were established facts. With comical credulity, it features as its centerpiece a leaked, transparently contrived, 33-page police sergeant’s memo that seeks to paper over some of the most obvious holes in the prosecution’s evidence.

This memo was concocted from memory, nearly four months after the underlying witness interviews, by Durham police Sgt. Mark Gottlieb, the lead investigator. Gottlieb says he took no contemporaneous notes, an inexplicable and indefensible police practice. Gottlieb had drawn fire before the alleged Duke rape—perhaps unbeknownst to the Times—as a Dukie-basher who reveled in throwing kids into jail for petty drinking infractions, noise violations, and the like, sometimes with violent criminals as cellmates.

Gottlieb’s memo is contradicted on critical points by the contemporaneous notes of other police officers, as well as by hospital records seeming to show that the accuser did not have the injuries Gottlieb claims to have observed. The Times blandly mentions these contradictions while avoiding the obvious inference that the Gottlieb memo is thus unworthy of belief.

An NYT/Mike Nifong alliance. How embarrassing.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 30th, 2006 at 3:37 pm and is filed under art, culture, General, idiots!, Left of Left, MSM. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.