A few days ago, at NewsWeek, Stuart Taylor wrote:

With Nifong leading the assault, the three young scholar-athletes had been smeared from coast to coast as thugs, racists and probable rapists—by dozens of their own professors, by black and feminist leaders and by many in the news media, for the better part of a year.

Nobody but cranks and haters will ever be able to hurl those lies at them again.

Today at NewsWeek there’s a six-page piece by Susannah Meadows and Evan Thomas which leads off with a recital of the lacrosse players being declared innocent by the state’s AG and includes this:

For the press, it was an irresistible tale, with its stew of race, sex and class. It was a story that had every ingredient that the press savors. There were entitled rich kids at an exclusive university; there was a white prosecutor who seemed to be playing the race card to get elected by black voters; there was a sympathetic alleged victim, a black woman who was an exotic dancer, but who was also a single mother who said that she was a student at a local college. And lastly, there was an allegation of the most lurid kind of sexual violence. The press needed there to have been a rape to keep the story going. It was much too dull to consider that the lacrosse players deserved the presumption of innocence. Finnerty’s girlfriend, Jessica, would throw things at the TV.

For weeks, NEWSWEEK’s cover story on the case, illustrated with mug shots of Finnerty and Seligmann (Evans had not yet been indicted), sat on a table in the family den before Finnerty finally got around to reading it. “The title [’Sex, Lies and Duke’] was pretty bad,” Finnerty recalled.

The photo above is of the cover of the May 1st 2006 issue of NewsWeek. This next one is apparently from inside the issue, and was subtitled “Web of Involvement”:

When Meadows and Thomas say “For the press, it was an irresistible tale, with its stew of race, sex and class,” they know of what they speak because the lead article behind the May issue cover was also written by Meadows and Thomas, and contained this boilerplate:

With its soaring Gothic chapel tower (the gift of a tobacco heir), Duke was the physical model for Dupont University in Wolfe’s “I Am Charlotte Simmons”—an elite school vying with the Ivies for prestige and the best and brightest students. For decades those students were white and privileged, though in recent years Duke, like its competitors, has become more diverse.

…Strutting lacrosse players are a distinctive and familiar breed on elite campuses along the Eastern Seaboard. Because the game until recently was played mostly at prep schools and in upper-middle-class communities on New York’s Long Island and outside Baltimore, the players tend to be at once macho and entitled, a sometimes unfortunate combination. They can often be seen driving in SUVs with LAX decals, their dirty-white college ball caps turned around, a pinch of Skoal in their mouths.

…The two players arrested last week fit the rich-kid stereotype, though they were praised by neighbors and teachers as exemplary young men. Seligmann’s father works in finance; the family lives in a stately brick Georgian in Essex Fells, N.J., assessed at $1.35 million in 2005. Seligmann, who was recruited by Harvard and Princeton as well as Duke, was described by Essex Fells Mayor Ed Abbot as “in many ways a role model to all the boys.” Finnerty’s father is a Wall Street financier with a $2 million Dutch colonial next to the Garden City (N.Y.) Golf Club and a $4.3 million summer home in West Hampton Beach, complete with motorboat and tennis court.

That makes the players almost, well, hooligans. Rich, white hooligans. Contrast the passage with the article’s ending:

Across town, at NCCU, the mostly black college where the alleged victim is enrolled, students seemed bitterly resigned to the players’ beating the rap. “This is a race issue,” said Candice Shaw, 20. “People at Duke have a lot of money on their side.” Chan Hall, 22, said, “It’s the same old story. Duke up, Central down.” Hall said he wanted to see the Duke students prosecuted “whether it happened or not. It would be justice for things that happened in the past.” (On a bulletin board in the student lounge was a long list of students with grades high enough to qualify for the Golden Key International Honour Society. On the list was the name of the alleged rape victim.)

At the Church of Apostolic Revival International, Bishop John Bennett worried about civil unrest “if people don’t think the victim is treated fairly.” He gestured outside his East Durham church to the hardscrabble neighborhood outside. “This area is the area they need to be praying about.” As town and gown collide, this much is certain: amid the confusion, there is plenty of cause for prayer, from the fringes of Durham to the heart of Duke.

The May article was titled “What Happened At Duke?”, and probably explains why there’s a need to now do some tidying up at NewsWeek.

To its credit the magazine was better at reporting and assessing facts; the June 19 issue carried Meadows’ piece The Duke Accuser—New Credibility Questions, and the June 29 issue had Meadows/Thomas making this point:

It is possible, almost three months later, that the players are maintaining a conspiracy of silence. But it seems highly unlikely. Rather, court documents in the case increasingly suggest that Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong had very little evidence upon which to indict three players for rape. Indeed, the available evidence is so thin or contradictory that it seems fair to ask what Nifong could have been thinking when he confidently told reporters that there was “no doubt” in his mind that the woman had been raped at the party held by the lacrosse team.

That was six months less than it took (for instance) MSNBC legal analyst Susan Filan to finally stop drawing to an inside straight and fold her hand, making excuses for herself all the way.

To their own credit, Meadows and Thomas can probably forget about working for the New York Times, which seems to have little use for their remediation skills.

It’s less clear that NewsWeek has also retracted the class/race/sex movie script, but it’s remarkable that Stuart Taylor was allowed to write “three young scholar-athletes had been smeared from coast to coast” by “professors, by black and feminist leaders and by many in the news media” at a publication many have taken to calling “NewsWeak”.

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