The Race to Prematurely Cast Blame During Crises Can Get Journalists Into Trouble
10/8/26 – – From a journalist’s point of view, one factor that heightens interest in a story is culpability. Reporters covering a tragedy or disaster feel it’s their job to assign responsibility for the bad things that happened. They transition quickly from fact finding to finger pointing, proclaiming villains and victims.
Competitive pressures in today’s 24/7 digital news and social media environment make it difficult to wait for all or even most of the facts to be determined before assessing blame. And there is a special appetite for stories presenting opportunities to place responsibility, even prematurely, on people or institutions already disliked or stereotyped.
Reporters Acting Like Casting Directors
As we’re seeing in the evolving coverage of rape allegations at Cornell University, once a news organization casts villains and victims, there is a temptation to ignore or downplay new information unsupportive of an established narrative.
The Cornell story is a character-rich environment for reporters: administrators of an elite Ivy League university protective of their school’s reputation, a local district attorney sensitive to “town and gown” considerations, entitled young men living in a seemingly unsupervised fraternity house, a vulnerable young women and angry student body feeling betrayed not only by their peers, but by adults they thought would protect them.
Sounds like the elements of a best-selling novel.
But just as the characters in great literature are complex, who the villains and victims are in real-life crises may not be so easy to see until the later chapters, likely in the Cornell case to be written months from now in civil and criminal courts.
The Lessons of Duke Lacrosse
On the evening of March 13, 2006, members of Duke University’s men’s lacrosse team hired two “exotic dancers” to perform at a house many of the players were living in just off campus. Things did not go as planned. One of the dancers, Crystal Mangum, charged that she had been brutally raped in the house by three team members.
Initial media coverage, which exploded internationally, unequivocally cast Ms. Mangum, an African American woman, as the victim and the lacrosse team, predominantly white men, as the villains. Even though the players denied the charges and conflicting facts were coming out by the hour, 88 Duke faculty members signed and published an advertisement in the school’s newspaper shaming the accused players.
The villains were clear to see. The media piled on.
That all changed when it became clear no rape had occurred. Crystal Mangum’s story was discredited. All charges against the players were dropped.
The local district attorney, who had hidden critical DNA evidence supporting the players’ claims, was disbarred and went to jail for criminal contempt. Duke reached multi-million-dollar settlement agreements with the falsely accused players. Ms. Mangum, who admitted she had made false charges against the Duke students, was released earlier this year from prison after serving time for an unrelated 2013 second-degree murder conviction.
Fallout From False Charges at University of Virginia
In 2014, the editors of Rolling Stone magazine looked into charges of a gang rape at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house on the campus of the University of Virginia. An article in the November 19, 2014, issue by Sabrina Erdely (“A Rape on Campus: A Brutal Assault and Struggle for Justice at UVA”) seemed to confirm the ugliest perceptions of “Greek life” and collegiate misogyny.
Like the Duke lacrosse case, the Rolling Stone article spawned international criticism and damnation of the University of Virginia well before the facts of the story, which were thin and conflicting, could be properly vetted.
The magazine, after an independent investigation by Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, retracted the story in April 2015 and admitted it was unlikely the events described in the article ever took place. In 2016, a court ordered Rolling Stone and the writer to pay Nicole Eramo, an associate dean falsely portrayed as a villain in the article, $3 million. In 2017, Phi Kappa Psi was awarded $1.65 million.
The Cornell Story Is Still Being Written
As is true with all crises, the facts are not the same in the Duke, UVA and Cornell situations. But based on what I’ve experienced over more than three decades of working with media during crises, villain and victim roles in the Cornell case are not set in stone.
The civil complaint filed last month on behalf of Jane Doe characterizes the events that took place on the evening of October 19, 2024, in Cornell’s Chi Phi fraternity house as “reckless, extreme and outrageous.” That’s not in dispute. But inconsistent, contradictory first-hand accounts of what transpired before, during and after the event make it much more difficult to determine — in both a court of law and the court of public opinion — ultimate culpability.
There are important societal issues brought to light by this troubling occurrence that deserve everyone’s attention. But as we have those broader discussions, it would be wise to withhold our final judgment of individuals and institutions implicated in this particular case.
My guess is there are plenty of plot twists ahead.
