The Lie the Media Brought to Life

In March 2006 Crystal Gail Mangum accused three members of the Duke lacrosse team of raping her at a party held on March 13, 2006. The charges against the three boys were dismissed as Mangum's accusations were completely false. These are simply the facts of the case. The accused boys were victims of a "tragic rush to accuse".

One might wonder how a case based completely around an entirely made-up story can get so far. The answer is simple: the media. The media dramatized the story to the point where people jumped to conclusions about the guilt of the boys.The media did this by bringing up un-related subjects like race and socio-economic status, by bringing in bias and preconceptions, and by some media outlets exaggerating the story to compete with others.

After the accusations, the stories released by major news outlets mentioned many things that weren't necessary for the reader to understand the story at all. For example, in an April 1st article, the New York Times called the lacrosse team "a clubby, hard-partying outfit with roots in the elite prep schools of the Northeast." Calling the team "hard-partying" and hinting at the average socio-economic status of Duke's students by using the word "elite", contributed nothing to the readers understanding of the story. What these things did do is make the reader likely to side with the accuser before any real evidence had actually been presented. The media knew what they wanted people to think and they made biased speculations to convince their readers.

Sometimes, the media dramatized the story just to compete with other news outlets' coverage of the same story. In the following clip, Nancy Grace uses an exaggerated tone to dramatize the Duke case.



The type of coverage seen in that Nancy Grace clip gives people an exaggerated view of the story and is only dramatized in order to compete with more balanced news coverage. For example, the coverage of the case shown on the Early Show.




The media's blatent exaggeration of the story and their providing of biased information is not an accident. The media is intentionally doing these things in order to get people to side with who they want and to not see the whole truth. The media will always provide the news in whatever manner gets them more viewers. This means they will not always provide the fair and balanced news that some people trust them to. The three innocent boys that were accused in the Duke rape case were victims of the media's unrelenting bias that caused many people to jump to conclusions about their guilt.