Newsweek commentator David Graham recently declared the Philadelphia Voter Intimidation controversy to be a non-story: “it’s not about a real investigation; it’s about staging an effective piece of political theater that hurts the Obama administration.”  He also meandered into the assertion that the ACORN scandal was “minimal” and “discredited.”  Graham’s career-long track record of suppressing news (without troubling himself with investigation) follows him way, way back to his college years at Duke University.  Why bring up such ancient history?  Well, because he graduated from Duke last year, in 2009.

One of the greatest media frauds in modern history, the Duke Lacrosse Hoax was once a story of violent, racially motivated gang rape by supposedly privileged white men (many were actually on significant financial aid).  Finally, here was the evidence verifying the far-left narrative of America as a deeply oppressive, racist society – evidence that had been missing, in the opinion of one Duke Professor, since the murder of Emmitt Till more than fifty years earlier.  Radical leftists throughout the campus and the nation came out of the woodwork to demand the alleged incident be used as a pretext for a comprehensive discussion on the roles of race, class, and gender in our society.

By the time David Graham took over as editor of the Duke Chronicle, the story was quickly becoming a story of the extraordinary bigotry of segments of the far left and their perverse willingness to exploit an obvious hoax to advance a political and cultural agenda.  The story became the willingness of the Duke Faculty and Administration to burn their own students at the stake in the advancement of, and in fear of, this same leftist narrative.

All of a sudden, none of these individuals at Duke wanted to talk about the matter anymore, least of all the administration.  It was time to put it all behind us.  Enter David Graham.

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Last week, a post I wrote for Big Journalism which, unbeknownst to me, possibly inspired Bill O’Reilly’s Talking Points Memo later that evening. I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t notice it at the time. I watch Bill and the rest of the Fox guys when I can, but with three kids in the house it’s not every day. In any case, my post and Bill’s memo were strongly worded critiques of this David A. Graham piece for Newsweek in which he downplayed the New Black Panther story. Last Friday, Graham issued a somewhat belated response to Bill and me (okay, I admit, I like saying that). Here’s how his piece opens:

Last week, I found myself in the crosshairs of conservative ire because a news analysis I wrote didn’t take the allegations of voter intimidation by the New Black Panther Party story as seriously as conservatives felt it should.

Right off the bat we’ve shifted the goalposts. My critique was based on Graham’s biased handling of the material, in particular his use of the hacks and non-entities at Media Matters as a primary source, as well as his failure to get even Media Matters’ highly spun version of the story straight. Here’s a bit of what I wrote:

That second link–the one about questionable testimony–goes right back to Media Matters. David A. Graham summarizes MM’s lengthy hit piece by saying, “there are doubts about whether he was actually present for the incidents he described.” Well, no, there are not doubts about that at all. In his interview with Megyn Kelly (which Media Matters transcribes), [J. Christian] Adams plainly states that he wasn’t there…

That’s not a critique of Graham’s news judgment; it’s a critique of his facts. Rather than address the problem directly or issue a correction, he simply revises his original claim in the new piece: (more…)