Allusions to lacrosse case tired

During last week’s MSNBC coverage of the now-infamous Karen Owen PowerPoint presentation, The Today Show sent representatives to East Campus to interview students on the subject. The footage, which aired on the show and can be found easily on Google, clocks in at just over seven minutes long. Most of the segment is spent rehashing what is by now old news concerning Owen, but a 20-second clip toward the beginning is devoted to a retelling of the Duke lacrosse scandal.

If this portion of the NBC report feels out of place, it’s because it is. Jeff Rossen, who narrates the piece, brings himself to the subject of the lacrosse case by a feeble segue from the fact that many of Owen’s lovers were lacrosse players. “Most of them were Duke lacrosse players,” he says, “a sensitive issue around here since the Duke lacrosse scandal of 2006.” The only intellectual stimulation Rossen provides with a comment like this one is the inherent difficulty in attempting to identify its most troubling aspect.

Honestly, it could be the poor English; was Rossen trying to say that the Duke lacrosse players themselves have been issues since 2006? That doesn’t make any sense. Or, equally nonsensically, might he be suggesting that their relations with Owen have been issues for the past four years? Also ridiculous. In fact, there may not be a single insightful (or comprehensible) way to read that sentence. Let’s infer though, for the sake of the discussion, that he was explaining that the subject of the Duke lacrosse case has been a sensitive one on campus since 2006. This actually reads correctly, but appears to be equally misguided for a separate set of reasons.

It’s reasonable to suggest that most people on campus, given the information we have now as well as the passage of time requisite for healing, probably come to similar conclusions regarding the Duke lacrosse case. If they don’t, well, at least you’d never know it, as no one seems to be at anyone else’s throat over it anymore. Furthermore, Rossen’s rebranding of the case as one that’s still acting to create dissonance within the student body is contradictory to the initial media framing of the case as a Duke vs. Durham issue that, in its heat to sell a story, presented two united factions ready to go to war. The notion, then, that the Duke lacrosse case is still divisive within the University, as well as student body, seems to be coming from a place that at best is more than slightly out of touch.

Although Jeff Rossen’s sentence construction and mischaracterization of major former University issues are both highly off-putting, the most damningly unfortunate part of his report is that he mentions the lacrosse case at all. In fact, a number of media outlets who reported on Owen almost invariably linked the story with lacrosse, including the venerable New York Times. Though the instances share certain features and as a result might bring one another to mind, it’s not enough to warrant a retelling of an already tired story just for the sake of it. By tying the lacrosse case to any sex or lacrosse related story at Duke, the media keeps that story alive and, in some backwards way, fresh. It’s the news organizations that continue to stimulate any residual sensitivity that exists and then cyclically go on to underline that same sensitivity by highlighting it in tangentially related reports.

And it’s not just the recent NBC and New York Times reports either. Those who follow the school’s lacrosse team will recall the national semifinal game last year, in which the Blue Devils played the top-ranked Virginia Cavaliers. The game took place only weeks after Virginia midfielder George Huguely was accused of brutally murdering his ex-girlfriend Yeardley Love, inspiring lengthy discussions between game commentators on the similarities between the Duke and Virginia scandals. Never mind that one case involved the isolated and individual death of a young woman, and the other false allegations of rape that grew to unfairly incriminate an entire team; evidently, the fact that both involved lacrosse teams and some area of law were enough. And after Duke’s national championship victory two days later? Discussion after discussion of vindication for the class of super-seniors, finally successful after having been put to the test all those years ago.

None of this is to say that the team, as has been explained on countless occasions, was entirely innocent in its conduct on the night of the alleged incident, and it’s easy from a rational (not to mention cynical) standpoint to see why the case lingers around in the media. However, to continually bring it up in semi-related circumstances cheapens the issues that the case did raise, in addition to visiting an unfair stain upon a team that is at this point in time completely disassociated with the incident. It’s best to remember things like the Duke lacrosse case for their lessons without constantly revitalizing them for their cheap entertainment value.

Perhaps we never will hear the end of that story but, if we do, it cannot come soon enough.