Ethics Corner: Did North Carolina Daily Bend the Rules for Its Scoop?

By: Allan Wolper The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., has a hard- and-fast rule: It won't identify women who say they've been raped, and it will not publish anonymous attacks on anyone. In fact, the paper is so leery of using unnamed critics that it deleted every reference to anonymous sources in a recent New York Times story it published about the Bush Administration monitoring banking transactions. But even a newspaper with strong ethics can lose its way in the highly competitive atmosphere surrounding a national story playing out in its backyard. That's what happened to the N&O when it published

an exclusive, emotional interview with an unidentified African-American woman who claimed she had been raped, sodomized, and beaten by three white members of the Duke lacrosse team.

By now the details are familiar: The woman, a student at North Carolina Central who moonlights as an exotic dancer, was paid to perform at an off-campus party. The front page read like a verdict: "Dancer gives details of ordeal: A woman hired to dance for the Duke lacrosse team describes a night of racial slurs, growing fear and, finally, sexual violence."

Ted Vaden, the N&O's public editor, later stated that the story flunked the paper's fairness test. "It's one thing to protect the identity of a sexual assault victim," he wrote in his column. "It's another to let her make detailed allegations without being identified."

That March 25 interview was published one day after 46 members of the Duke team agreed to a DNA test and before the results were in, giving readers the impression there was already enough evidence to indict some of the lacrosse players. That perception was reinforced when Samiha Khanna, the N&O reporter who interviewed the woman, appeared on The Abrams Report, an MSNBC cable program. "She sort of wondered how I had found her," Khanna said, according to a transcript of the broadcast. "And I assured [her that] her identity was not going to be revealed, as we don't publish the names of sexual assault victims."

Since then, three men have been indicted, although the DNA evidence did not seem to tie any of the suspects directly to the alleged assault. However, lack of DNA evidence doesn't always mean a sexual attack did not occur.

The N&O editors obviously felt that its competitor, The Herald-Sun in Durham, N.C., would have published the interview if one of its reporters had gotten to the woman first. And they would have been right. "It's easy to snipe," said Bob Ashley, editor of the Herald-Sun. "But had we an opportunity to have gotten that interview, we would have run it."

N&O Executive Editor Melanie Sill pointed out in her blog that the story would have contained better balance had the lacrosse players or someone representing them agreed to respond to the woman's charges. But Sill insists her newspaper did not violate its policy against using anonymous sources when it published the woman's story.

"She was not an anonymous source," Sill told me. "Her name was known to the people she was accusing. Her name was on the police report. She was identified by name on the Internet. That is not the case with anonymous sources."

That argument wasn't enough to convince the paper's public editor. Vaden said, "Interviewing an alleged victim anonymously conflicts with the paper's policy on anonymous sources."

Katherine White, a former libel and First Amendment attorney for the N&O who is now a computer analyst for a North Carolina state agency, said women in alleged-rape cases risk being named in news stories if they grant too many interviews: "She can't ask that her name be kept out of newspapers if she puts herself out there publicly."

But a cloak of anonymity stigmatizes rape victims. "When you don't identify a rape victim, it perpetuates the idea that they have done something wrong," added White, a former investigative reporter for The Sun in Baltimore and The Charlotte (N.C.) Observer. "Women shouldn't be ashamed. They are victims. I've always thought that if I were raped, I would allow a newspaper to identify me. But that is a very personal decision. I wouldn't want to impose that on anyone else."

Should the victim in the Duke lacrosse case be identified if the three men are acquitted? "That's a good question," White said quietly. "But their acquittal might only mean that the prosecutor could not prove his case beyond a reasonable doubt. It does not mean she wasn't raped."

The trial of the three players is scheduled to start next spring. But the case ? and the paper's role in it ? will be debated fiercely this fall in the court of public opinion.