What did or didn't happen at Duke: a look at the case of an alleged rape at Duke University reveals the bias of the major media and the need for moral order to once again be upheld on college campuses.

What's the difference between an alleged rape at Duke University and an alleged rape at Fresno City College? The Duke case received dozens of stories in the New York Times. The other case didn't. Ditto for the Washington Post.

Another difference? At Duke, the accused are white and the victim is black. At Fresno, the accused are black and the victim is Hispanic--typical media bias.

But that typical media bias is just one disturbing aspect of a case that is disturbing all together, not only for what it says about media bias and race and crime, but also for what it says about the culture of college campuses.

When he was president of Washington College, Robert E. Lee said he would consider himself a failure if a student was graduated without becoming a Christian. If that standard were applied today, one might ask, how many college presidents would be considered failures?

The Duke Case

What happened at Duke is well known, but for readers who didn't have the benefit of having had the New York Times or Washington Post pound the story into their heads every day for a month, these are the facts:

On March 13, Duke lacrosse players threw a boozefest and invited two black strippers. One of them was a college student named "Precious," the alleged victim. Sometime after midnight during the party, the state claims, three Blue Devils raped the temptress. They threw in racial slurs for good measure.

According to the Raleigh News and Observer and other news outlets, however, the prosecutor's case has problems, not least of which is that two DNA tests cleared the players. As importantly, a second stripper stated that Precious' claims of rape were a "crock," and videotapes from a bank show one accused player at an ATM retrieving money when the alleged rape was supposed to have occurred.

Aside from that, the news media, even the New York Times, the latter in a begrudgingly and slyly misleading way, says a former Timesman writing a book about the case, disclosed other flies in the prosecutorial ointment: the prosecutor violated police protocol in showing the "victim" photos of the lacrosse team, the only post-coital DNA found in the "victim" came from her boyfriend, and hospital personnel did not find signs of sexual assault. Moreover, the "victim" has changed her story a half-dozen times, and at one point denied the players raped her. She also filed unproven charges of a gang rape 10 years ago.

News reports also say that prosecutors misled at least one judge in the case, and legal experts are scratching their heads. "You kind of find it hard to believe that this case in this condition can find its way to trial unless the prosecution has something going for it that we just don't know," said Stan Goldman, a law-school professor and former public defender. "That's the 64-dollar question," he told the Associated Press. "What does he have?"

You do find it hard to believe, for a fair reading of the coverage shows that the prosecutor has nothing legally convincing. But he does have something else very convincing: the ideal media script of privileged white jocks raping an innocent black girl, white jocks who thought they would escape justice because they are rich and white and attend Duke University and she is black and poor and ... You get the picture.

The Usual Media Treatment

As expected, the Duke story harvested acres of real estate in the New York Times and the Washington Post and other newspapers. A search of the CBS News.com site returns hundreds of hits on the case. Granted, the Times and other media have put forward the other side of the story, but they likely did so despite the truth, not because of it. Maybe someone dusted off those oldies but goodies about Tawana Brawley, the hoaxtress who manufactured a similar tale of rape at the hands of white cops in New York City.

Whatever the reason, compare this treatment with the case in Fresno, where police believe as many as 10 football players gang-raped an 11-year-old girl. Two of the suspects are black, although you'd never know from the print coverage because newspapers scrupulously avoid identifying the race of black defendants. The New York Times hasn't covered it. Neither has the Washington Post. A search of CBSNews.com on the case returned just two hits. The Los Angeles Times has covered it, but the paper omitted the race of the defendants in at least two stories.

In other words, the major media went off half-cocked on a lynch party to Duke, but the posse holstered its weapons and galloped for the sagebrush on the crime at Fresno. That, however, is nothing new.

Another even more heinous case than Fresno's was "The Wichita Massacre." That unspeakable crime in 2000 involved two blacks killing four whites after a sexual torture session best left undescribed. Again, the major media spiked the story.

Yet another example of media bias, observed columnist Larry Elder, involves the horrific murder of James Byrd, a black man whom three whites dragged to death behind their truck in 1998. The story was a national sensation. Yet in 2002, when three blacks kidnapped Kevin Tillery, a white man, and murdered him in much the same manner as the whites who killed Byrd, the major media shut their yap. Byrd was killed in Jasper, Texas. So was Tillery. Same town. Same crime. Two races.

Fact is, the major media frequently distort and censor crime stories unfavorable to minorities. Federal crime statistics show that Blacks and Hispanics commit a disproportionate share of crime compared to their numbers in the population, a truth newspapers and television take great pains to hide. Even television detective shows distort the truth. Programs such as Law and Order are nearly comic: the detectives investigate preposterous rapes and murders featuring mostly rich whites, such as museum docents, professors, and doctors.

And the double standard doesn't just apply to Blacks and other minorities. It also applies to crimes against homosexuals versus crimes committed by homosexuals. When homosexual Matthew Shepard was murdered in Wyoming, the story went worldwide and became the subject of an HBO special, The Laramie Project. Yet when two homosexual perverts in Arkansas sexually tortured and brutally raped and murdered 13-year-old Jesse Dirkhising, the major news media were dead silent. HBO took a powder.

The Real Problem

Still, media bias is hardly the most vexing issue with the case at Duke. Its import is what it confirms about the culture universally and at college campuses in particular, another subject untouched by the news media's enlightened, libertine elites.

The accusations against Duke's lacrosse players are unsurprising given the barnyard milieu of sex and alcohol in which college students typically wallow. What we saw at Duke was, in two words, utter debauchery. Drunkenness and illicit sex are daily routine.

When the dirty dust settles, maybe someone will observe that our permitting students to conduct such orgiastic revelries is the ultimate issue. Time was, colleges were Christian environments where students learned. No more.

Robert E. Lee is spinning.

R. Cort Kirkwood is managing editor of the Daily News-Record in Harrisonburg, Virginia. He is the author of Real Men: Ten Courageous Americans to Know and Admire.