PressEthic

Lots of newspaper coverage involves a judgment call.

Everyone agrees that the New York Times should cover every presidential election and domestic terrorist attack, but whether or not it should cover, for example, Augusta National's policy on women members -- and the amount of coverage the story justifies -- is ultimately a judgment call about which reasonable people differ.

Basically, we all agree that newspapers should report on injustices, serving as a societal watchdog. But what constitutes an injustice? What scents should we train the watchdog to seek?

I've got two nominations.

1) The Duke LaCrosse case

When news organizations thought it was a story about privileged white athletes raping a poor black working mother they "flooded the zone," quickly making the case a national story.

Now the narrative has changed, and whatever happened that night -- and it seems clear at the very least that one of the three players accused of rape is innocent -- there is at minimum a compelling case for prosecutorial misconduct that national news outlets ought to, in my news judgement, be covering.

The racial aspect of this case is bizarre because it seems to flip history on its head. So many times in American history black Southerners have been wrongly accused of heinous crimes, held based on flimsy evidence, and brought to trial partly because the local prosecutor felt heat from prejudiced white voters to file charges.

Thankfully, that happens less often in the South today than it once did, but on those occassions when it does happen I'd expect media organizations aware of the case to draw attention to the prosecutorial misconduct, and to crusade on their editorial pages for the fair treatment of

In this case, however, it is Southern whites who have been wrongly accused of heinous crimes, held based on flimsy evidence and brought to trial partly because the local prosecutor felt heat from prejudiced black voters to file charges.

It is largely left to an obscure blog to chronicle the prosecutorial misconduct and crusade for justice. Given the same media saturation, the same evidence and identical conduct by the same prosecutor, would the New York Times be treating this case the same if the defendants were black athletes and white Durham residents were calling for their heads?

2) No-Knock Raids Reason Magazine and the popular blog Instapundit are the most mainstream media sources regularly covering this trend and crusading against it.

In this case, the local newspaper will typically cover the story when it happens nearby, but -- and this is obviously a judgment call -- most press outlets haven't paid nearly enough attention to this problem, nor put it in context for readers, nearly enough given its gravity.

In contrast a regular Instapundit reader gets a pretty good perspective on why these raids are often a gross miscarriage of justice.

YEAH, I KNOW, one strength of blogs is that individual bloggers will seize on something that particularly interests them, and I can't expect the mainstream media to always share my news judgment on every matter.

Nevertheless I submit that prosecutorial misconduct and the likely prosecution of innocent men in the Duke Lacrosse case -- and no knock raids conducted by police departments all over the country -- are stories that desserve to be reported more fully on the news pages and taken up as crusades by more editorial pages.