Selena Roberts has struck again. In her new book, A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez, Roberts has reported that Rodriguez may have taken steroids as far back as high school. She may be reporting accurately, for all I know. However, after her horrific reporting on the Duke Lacrosse case and subsequent refusal to offer an apology for, as Jason Whitlock aptly describes it, “the public lynching of Reade Seligmann, Colin Finnerty and David Evans,” it’s really hard to believe anything she writes, even though much of it may be true. KC Johnson writes a solid assessment of Roberts’ coverage of the Duke Lacrosse case and her most recent attempt at journalism in his blog.
I leave it to you to follow the links and see what has been written.
Unfortunately, the most sinister aspect of Roberts’ reporting is not even the inaccuracies she has put forth, damaging as they may be. Rather, what bothers me most about her work are the assumptions upon which she operates and the way she handled the aftermath of the case. Concerning the outcome of the Duke Lacrosse case, Roberts wrote: “No one would want an innocent Duke player wronged or ruined by false charges -- and that may have occurred on Nifong's watch -- but the alleged crime and the culture are mutually exclusive.”
Mutually exclusive? That is to mean that the alleged crime did not arise from the culture, but the culture is still criminal in nature? If so, what is the cause of the crime? And more importantly, what then should be done about the culture? What kinds of changes would you make, Ms. Roberts? And for you reading, if you agree with Ms. Roberts, what would you do? Would you institute a “Diversity 101” class in US universities that indoctrinates students to a specific ideology? How far would you reach into the lives of students to fix this apparently evil culture?
And instead of remorse for her wild and accusatory reporting, we get the following: “Don't mess with Duke, though. To shine a light on its integrity has been treated by the irrational mighty as a threat to white privilege.” Certainly the “mighty”--those falsely accused of trumped-up charges of the insidious crime of rape--are therefore irrational for attempting to clear their names. This is a symptom of a major problem today. Instead of owning up to mistakes, people--like Roberts and the Gang of 88 (the Duke professors who unabashedly presumed the guilt of the lacrosse players)--don’t take any responsibility for their actions. Instead, they refuse to defend themselves! They hold on to a wavering modicum of apparent consensus they might have with the fringe groups they associate themselves with, and act as if that gives them the ‘categorical imperative’ to change the world.
Take Al Gore as another example of this type of reckless behavior. Mr. Gore has yet to be disproved in his allegations that we are destroying our globe by creating “global warming” or “climate change” or whatever he calls it nowadays, but a major reason that that is the case today is that he refuses to defend himself as well! Now, he may be right--I absolutely give him the benefit of the doubt here, and challenge him to prove himself to be so--but to simply disregard the qualms of his theory’s detractors and instead say that he represents “proven” science is absurd, and nonscientific. As John Stuart Mill once wrote: “Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth for purposes of action; and on no other terms can a being with human faculties have any rational assurance of being right.” Mill is right here, but Gore doesn’t seem to care; he has his money and his soapbox.
The saddest thing about the actions of those like the reckless Roberts and the grandstanding Gore is that there are so many out there who grab hold of their arguments without subjecting them to scrutiny, and simply believe their ideas. It’s a sad reflection on a culture that seems to want to operate on what should be true (to them), rather than what is. When the truth surfaces, the reply by the perpetrators of such alarmist, inaccurate ideas is not, "we were wrong, and we apologize for the lives we ruined/economic disaster we caused." Not at all. Instead of an apology or retraction, all we see are promotions for the Gang of 88, royalties for Selena Roberts, and a Nobel Prize for Al Gore. And the shoulds have the day.
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