Media blackout
by J. B. Cash
http://www.castefootball.us
It should be the feel good story of the new century, a team of good young men and student athletes that started their season under a cloud of accusation and media scorn. The kids are finally absolved of serious criminal charges against them and are proven completely innocent. They continue their inspired rise from the depths of popular opinion to reach the championship game.
Such compelling drama is the stuff of Hollywood movies. Just recently Hollywood devoted millions of dollars to make movies about other teams that have overcome similar adversity, such as “Glory Road,” the story of the first NCAA championship basketball team with an all-black starting line-up; and “Remember the Titans,” which centers on racial tensions on the football team of a newly integrated high school in Virginia.
However, the Duke lacrosse team is not a story that will be celebrated by Hollywood. It’s also a story you will not hear much about from the mainstream media because of the rigid orthodoxy of political correctness which is so firmly ingrained in our culture that it cannot be questioned. Thus the rise of the Duke men’s lacrosse team happens in the eerie stillness of a near media blackout. After narrowly defeating a stubborn Cornell team 12-11 with a goal in the last 13 seconds in front of a record crowd of 52,004 at Baltimore’s M&T Bank Stadium, Duke will meet number 3 ranked Johns Hopkins for the championship on Monday.
The Duke team, whose “scandal” dominated sports news coverage for months, is now in the championship game. They secured an exciting win in the final seconds in front of a crowd that exceeds the numbers that will appear at any of this week’s basketball or hockey playoff games and almost all of the regular season baseball games not to mention more than some football games on Saturday and Sunday in the fall.
Yet there is little to no media attention. Why, you must ask, is that?
Ordinarily in sports when a team stages an improbable comeback from heavy adversity to compete for the title, the media covers the story in depth. Everyone loves to hear the story of a “comeback,” a team’s chance at redemption, and the opportunity to experience success after so many bad things have happened to it.
Especially in a case where the story is so compelling, the Duke saga is a real-life tale full of villains: from the unfair actions of a disreputable accuser, to the crooked lawyer-politician that perverts the process of the law for personal gain, to the opportunistic race-card players rushing to the scene like ambulance chasers to an accident. For the modern day press, which functions mostly on tabloid style gossipy news, it seems too juicy for them to ignore.
Yet ignore it they do.
But the media blackout is not about the alleged “crime.” No the blackout is a predictable response from the media, a predictable response due to the fact that the media joined in on the almost unanimous pre-judging of the players as guilty even when all evidence pointed to their innocence.
The media, with very few exceptions, joyfully helped manufacture and perpetuate the false accusations against the players, even as the case quickly unraveled. Now that the whole affair has been exposed as an unconscionable sham is it any surprise that the media wishes the whole incident would go away and not have to say anything more — and certainly not anything good about the Duke lacrosse team?
In the very rare case where the incredible success of the Duke team must be acknowledged in some manner it is only done in a derisive tone as if they still must bear the guilt, still must wear the stigma of a sin that is clear to all they did not commit. But what is their real sin? To the forces that control the information outlets of USA Inc. the crime committed by the Duke players is a crime they are determined to see punished: so-called “white privilege.”
Every victory, every success, by the Duke lacrosse team is a dagger into the hearts of all those “impartial” news sources that rushed to judgment. Each time the team wins it is a reminder to all who care of how much the media wanted to see them fail. And the media did not merely want its version of “justice,” it wanted a pound of flesh. It wanted the three falsely accused men kicked off of the team, kicked out of school and imprisoned for many years. The media wanted the team destroyed. They were overjoyed when the school took the unprecedented step of suspending their season last year, even though no remaining players stood accused of any crime.
In this story we have a group of young men from good families that were victimized by a system that was intent on finding them guilty of crimes they did not commit, not because of what they did but because of who they are, and more importantly because of the color of their skin. It shows the vile hatred of white men that is found not just in black professional race hustlers, but in white liberals.
The media, the faculty, and the administration at Duke, the so-called social leaders and supposed arbiters of public opinion, sold their soul to the devil in this case. They wished for a case where they could find white men guilty of a crime of interracial gang rape, a crime that is so prevalent across the country — and almost always black men raping white women — that the media rarely publicizes the thousands of cases annually.
And now the team stuffs it back in the corporate media’s collective face. They win and celebrate, and bring some happiness back into their lives and the lives of family and friends after months of living as falsely accused pariahs. In doing so they expose the media silence as an exclamation point on how twisted and wrong the “leaders” of our country are.
We wish the best to the Duke team. They are our sons and brothers, our cousins and our friends. They represent the best among us. Each victory, every success is another example of the determination to overcome those that seek to destroy all that is good about our people and culture. It is an inspiring lesson for all of us to learn and emulate.