Fool
me once, shame on you. Fool me a couple of dozen times, and shame on
me -- but also shame on what passes for journalism on television.
This truism comes to mind after my
appearance on Paula Zahn Now on CNN this week to discuss the
Duke rape case. I'm not naive about these kinds of shows -- which I
know are not really about journalism but about ratings, most easily
obtained through sensationalism and playing to the prejudices of the
audience. But over the past 20 years I've gone on a number of them to
discuss my work as a sociologist on issues of racism and sexism in
media. Like many progressives, I do that with eyes wide open, knowing
the limits but realizing it's one of the few shots we have at a mass
audience.
But this time I foolishly had high hopes after a producer from Zahn's
show actually conducted a thoughtful screening interview, unlike any I
had spoken with in the past. Most producers typically are uninterested
in my views and tend to ask banal questions in these pre-interviews
over the phone. They usually don't care about my arguments, but simply
want to check that I have a big mouth (which, I admit, I do) and will
not freeze in fear when the cameras roll. When they recognize that I
am not someone who is likely to cower in the face of adversarial
arguments, that's enough for them.
But this CNN producer kept grilling me with questions that suggested
that they were interested in doing a show that looked at the
historical and contemporary issues of violence against black women in
this society. Four phone calls later, I agreed to fly to Durham to do
the show.
I was told I would be in at least two segments, possibly three. That
promise was crucial; there's no sense flying halfway across the
country to say a couple of sentences between the ads. So I dug in to
prepare, reading and consulting colleagues (all of them busy activists
and academics, including Mark Anthony Neal, Imani Perry, Robert Jensen
and Jackson Katz) about the way the media has framed the story. What
an utter waste of time and energy.
The first inkling that something wasn't going according to plan was on
my ride from the airport to the makeshift outdoor studio at the Durham
courthouse. A different producer called to tell me that although I
study both race and gender, they don't want this show to be about
gender. I answered that this woman was brought in as a stripper and is
charging that the lacrosse team sexually abused her -- how could this
not also be about gender? Yes, yes, yes, she answered, but the show is
focusing on race. I know enough by now not to argue with a senior
producer an hour before taping, and so I simply agreed.
The second clue was one of the people on the panel with me -- the Rev.
Jesse Lee Peterson, an African American man who has made his name by
slandering blacks for their racism against whites and their continuing
"unwillingness" to climb out of poverty. For Peterson, black men have
been emasculated by black women, and his project is about making black
men "real men" again. The one saving grace was that the other guest on
my panel was Kristal Brent Zook, an insightful journalist with
Essence magazine.
In the green room, Peterson went into a tirade against the black
leaders for destroying the black community with their leftist views,
and then thanked God for Fox News. When I started to argue with
him, CNN producers in the room explained to us all that news media in
America are doing their job -- Fox's right-wing views are balanced by
CNN's left-wing shows. About this time, I know I am in big trouble.
As the green room starts to fill with guests, I am getting the
distinctly uneasy feeling that there are too many people here for a
one-hour show that has promised me two to three segments. Guests come
and go, and my segment cohort is still sitting in the room at 8:20, 20
minutes after the start of the show. There's no way to watch the show
in the green room, and so I have no idea as to what the other guests
are saying and I am clueless as to what I am walking into.
As it turns out I was on camera for less than five minutes, and most
of that time was taken up by Peterson railing against the "alleged"
victim for setting these poor white guys up. Kristal got to make a few
points but also was cut short. Zahn was clearly more intrigued by
Peterson than either of us; her body language and eye contact focused
on him. As I tried to interrupt his tirade, she cut me off and
returned to him. He got the last word of the segment, saying that the
"stripper" has no humanity, no morality (she had children out of
"wedlock") and should be jailed for what she has done to these
athletes. As I got up to leave the studio I ask Zahn how she could do
a show that once again leaves this woman stripped of her dignity and
rendered invisible as a human being. Zahn smiled and offered her hand
as a way to tell me they are done with me.
When I got back to the hotel 30 minutes later, I already had a few
emails from enraged men informing me that I am a "bitch dyke," "dumb
feminist" and "nigger lover" who is an embarrassment to the academic
profession. By the next day at noon, it was a flood of emails, each
one more hateful than the next. After most television appearances I
get some hate mail and some support, but never such a consistently
negative barrage in such a short time. It is only when I sit down to
watch a tape of the show that I understood why everyone was so upset.
Rather than being about racism and sexism in the media, the show had
been billed as an examination of the "rush to judgment" on the part of
the media and society. The possibility that these men were guilty had
been "proved" wrong, as the victim is clearly lying and motivated by
money. The case is framed as a "race" issue, which for producers meant
that blacks are out for revenge for past misdeeds by whites. Jumping
on this bandwagon, so the story goes, was the District Attorney Mike
Nifong, who was trying to curry favor with the black community in a
re-election year. The consensus on the show was that if anyone is
guilty here, it is the lying, immoral black stripper and the amoral,
politically motivated DA. The victims here are the upstanding white
men who have now had their reputations tarnished first by a stripper
and then by gullible fools who believed her. And of course, within the
framing of the show, I appeared as not just a gullible fool, but even
worse, a gullible fool with a feminist agenda.
My anger at the way the media humanized these men as victims and
dehumanized the woman as the perpetrator of a lie clearly stood out
from the rest of the show. And this was, I am now convinced, the
producer's goal. I was set up in the show to be an example of the
problem -- white liberal elites who have taken political correctness
too far. I was not brought on as a researcher or activist but as an
example of how feminists "rush to judgment" in order to further their
man-hating propaganda.
Virtually every email I have received blasts me as a conniving
feminist who didn't even bother to know the facts of the case. These
men -- yes, they all were from men -- explained to me that the facts
show without question that nothing happened that night, which I would
have known if I were not so busy trying to further my feminist
agenda.
This is truly an example of how mass media construct reality. The
so-called "facts" of the case have mainly been planted by the defense
as a way to spin the case. The prosecution can't reveal all their
evidence by law, but we do know, as law professor Wendy Murphy has
pointed out, enough evidence was presented that "police, forensic
experts, prosecutors, and a grand jury comprised of citizens, all
agreed that charges should be brought." The truth is that we actually
have access to very little evidence about that night, yet every man
who has emailed me is convinced that all the facts are out there and
only a feminist fool would believe otherwise. This is because the
"facts," or lack of, speak for themselves and tell their own story in
a society where racist and sexist ideology is internalized by a good
percentage of the population and subsequently writ large onto a black
woman's body. Let's not forget that this woman was bought and sold in
the white male marketplace of sexual entertainment.
This obsessive focus on the woman is not particular to this case;
routinely the media focus on the women victims, with a certain
prurient interest. Instead, we should put some of the focus back on
the men in this case, as we know much about their behavior that night
that is not under dispute. They saw the hiring of two black women to
strip as a legitimate form of male entertainment. They didn't see the
commodifying and sexualizing of black women's bodies as problematic in
a country that has a long and ugly history of racism.
One of the team buddies, Ryan McFadyen, sent out an e-mail on the
night of the event where he wrote "ive decided to have some strippers
over and all are welcome . . . I plan on killing the bitches as they
walk in and proceed to cut their skin off while cumming in my duke
spandex." Later that night, 911 got a call from a black college
student out walking with her friends who was called "nigger" as she
walked past the team's house. And to top it all, not one lacrosse
player has come forward to express any regret at that night's events
or offered any apology for being part of a drunken strip party that
humiliated and degraded two black women.
It would seem to me that all of this undisputed information would make
for a compelling CNN program. On such a show, I would be happy to
share these e-mails calling me a bitch, whore, and cunt. That wouldn't
be a rush to judgment, but instead an acknowledgement of what women
know -- any one of us could be the next victim turned celebrity
whore.
Gail Dines, professor of American
Studies at Wheelock College in Boston, is one of the organizers of the
upcoming conference "Pornography
and Pop Culture: Reframing Theory, Re-thinking Activism."
She can be reached at:
gdines@wheelock.edu.