Justice delayed: many in the media jettisoned caution--and the presumption of innocence--in their coverage of an alleged rape by Duke lacrosse players, and were too slow to correct the record as the case unraveled. But some journalists distinguished themselves with skeptical and incisive reporting.

As Reade Seligmann choked back tears on the witness stand, the 21-year-old Duke University lacrosse player dubbed "Flustered" by teammates was poised, compelling and clearly hurting. He told of a world turned "upside down" and of experiencing "as lonely of a feeling as you can ever imagine" after he was indicted for allegedly raping a stripper at a team party on March 13, 2006. He described the stinging slights from former friends, the terrifying death threats--and the inescapable media horde.

On April 18,2006, Seligmann and teammate Collin Finnerty were arrested on charges of first-degree rape, first-degree sex offense and first-degree kidnapping. After posting bond, Seligmann hurried out the back of the Durham County Jail, but there was no hiding from the media. "We pretty much had to run to our car to get there," he told a hushed courtroom and a disciplinary panel of the North Carolina State Bar on June 15, 2007. "From that initial bum rush to our car, that was the beginning of just a media frenzy for an entire year, and it continues now."

Michael B. Nifong--the district attorney who pursued Seligmann, Finnerty and teammate David Evans even as evidence of their innocence mounted and his case imploded--was held accountable for his actions. Hours after Seligmann testified, Nifong announced his intention to resign; the next day, he was disbarred.

The media incurred no such penalties. No loss of license, no disciplinary panels, no prolonged public humiliation for the reporters, columnists, cable TV pundits, editorial writers and editors who trumpeted the "Duke lacrosse rape case" and even the "gang-rape case" in front-page headlines, on the nightly news and on strident cable shoutfests.

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Of course, Nifong had information and power the media did not. His failing in the case cannot be overstated, nor can it be equated to that of a throng of journalists and pundits, however odious some of their reporting and commentary.

But the media deserve a public reckoning, too, a remonstrance for coverage that--albeit with admirable exceptions--all too eagerly embraced the inflammatory statements of a prosecutor in the midst of a tough election campaign. Fueled by Nifong, the media quickly latched onto a narrative too seductive to check: rich, wild, white jocks had brutalized a working class, black mother of two.

"It was too delicious a story," says Daniel Okrent, a former New York Times public editor, who is critical of the Times' coverage and that of many other news organizations. "It conformed too well to too many preconceived notions of too many in the press: white over black, rich over poor, athletes over non-athletes, men over women, educated over non-educated. Wow. That's a package of sins that really fit the preconceptions of a lot of us."

The lessons of the media's rush to judgment and their affair with a sensational, simplistic storyline rank among journalism's most basic tenets: Be fair; stick to the facts; question authorities; don't assume; pay attention to alternative explanations.

"The outcome of this whole story is square pegs can't be fit into round holes, and we saw the dangers of what happens when modern media attempts to do that," says Duke senior Ryan McCartney, who for much of the saga was editor of the Chronicle, the independent student newspaper. "Hopefully this case will kind of go down in the books as a lesson to media organizations on all levels to ... second-guess themselves any time they think a story is clear-cut."

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Too often, the preconceptions--rather than the facts--dictated not only the tone of the coverage but also its volume and prominence. "I think that you begin by being prudent," Okrent says. "And that's not the way that the American press began on this story. You begin by being prudent and, as things develop, that determines whether you amp up the volume or not. Here it began with a roar at the very start. It went in the wrong direction. If it had begun calmly and prudently, it never would have become a roar."

The roar began on March 24, 2006, when Raleigh's News & Observer broke the news on its front page that "all but one member of the Duke lacrosse team had reported to the Durham police crime lab" for DNA testing. "Police think at least three of the men could be responsible for the sexual assault, beating, robbery and near-strangulation of one of two women who had an appointment to dance at the party March 13, according to a search warrant," the story said.

As the shocking allegations ricocheted across the nation and a media mob descended on Durham, the district attorney served up salacious sound bites affirming a certain crime with chilling racial overtones. On March 31, 2006, Nifong told the N & O that he'd given "in excess of 50" interviews; he also spoke publicly on the case. He called the players "hooligans." He told MSNBC, "I am convinced there was a rape." He proclaimed, "I'm not going to allow Durham's view in the minds of the world to be a bunch of lacrosse players from Duke raping a black girl in Durham."

Following the Nifong playbook, many in the media abandoned the possibility of innocence. "I'm so glad they didn't miss a lacrosse game over a little thing like gang rape!" CNN Headline News' Nancy Grace exclaimed March 31, during a broadcast in which she portrayed the athletes as rich, privileged jocks.

Even for reporters concerned with evenhandedness, Nifong's on-the-record proclamations complicated the coverage. When the media pursued Richard Jewell, who was wrongly suspected of the Centennial Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta, some journalists irresponsibly ran with off-the-record leaks from law enforcement sources (see "Going to Extremes," October 1996). In this instance, Durham's DA condemned the team for attribution. Journalists who ignored the horrific allegations or the inflamed racial and class tensions in the community would have neglected what seemed to be an important story.

A fast-shifting set of facts and the team's reluctance to speak publicly also flummoxed reporters early on. "The ground was moving underneath your feet," McCartney says. "It was true for the administration, it was true for the lacrosse players, it was true for the media, it was true for us as student journalists. We were just trying to get our bearings.... It takes a very bold person to step back and say, 'They're getting it wrong.'"

National and international coverage tended to focus on strains between "town and gown," depicting an elite, largely white university colliding with the working-class, racially mixed city that surrounds it. The privileged nature of Duke's students, particularly its athletes, was frequently invoked; references to Duke's "Gothic" architecture and the schisms of the Old South were also popular. Several accounts noted that Duke was thought to be the model for the hard-partying, elite institution portrayed in Tom Wolfe's 2004 novel, "I Am Charlotte Simmons," which also featured rich lacrosse players.

"University rape highlights racial divisions in South," proclaimed London's Sunday Telegraph on April 2, 2006. "Lax Environment; Duke lacrosse scandal reinforces a growing sense that college sports are out of control, fueled by pampered athletes with a sense of entitlement," said a Los Angeles Times headline on April 16, 2006. A March 31 USA Today story weighed in on the divisive atmosphere: "The racially charged lacrosse team sexual assault scandal that is roiling Duke University has also exposed deep divisions between the elite private school and the more humble Tobacco Road community that surrounds it."

The New York Times, which would publish more than 100 pieces on the case, first weighed in on March 29, after Duke suspended the team's season. The page-one story headlined "Rape Allegation Against Athletes is Roiling Duke" contained no reference to Nifong's heated campaign for district attorney (he'd initially been appointed to the post), which many observers later said motivated him to hurtle forward with a disastrous case.

Times Executive Editor Bill Keller says criticism of his paper's performance has "in some instances been unfair to the point of hysteria." But he also says, "I think we were a little slow to get traction on the story, frankly. Partly we were slow figuring out who had custody of the story: sports, national, investigative. It took us awhile to get specific people focused on this as their responsibility."

Keller says the Times tended to cover the saga episodically "rather than early on focusing a lot of investigative energy on the story. It took us longer than it should have for us to give the holes in the prosecutor's case the attention it deserved." He adds that reporters' jobs were complicated initially because the defense wasn't talking.

Nifong showed no such restraint, accusing the players of hiding behind "this stone wall of silence." He told CNN, "[i]t just seems like a shame that they are not willing to violate this seeming sacred sense of loyalty to team for loyalty to community." In reality, the co-captains had voluntarily given statements and taken DNA tests; they also offered to take polygraph tests.