Its official -- as of today, the members of the Duke University lacrosse team are innocent of all charges brought against them by North Carolina District Attorney Mike Nifong. The case, which dealt with an alleged sexual assault of a poor black stripper on March 13th of last year, had been the source of a media frenzy for months. While the media all but indicted defendants Collin Finnerty, Reade Seligmann, and David Evans early on in the saga, questions started to emerge when DNA evidence didn't corroborate the alleged victim's story. Her credibility was increasingly called into question, and by December of 2006 the media had decided the case again, this time in favor of the defendants.

The charges caused Duke to cancel the season for the lacrosse team, and it also cost Coach Mike Pressler his job. But those things can be undone; the case also unfairly put these three college students in the spotlight -- sure, they're not going to jail, but what will remedy the year they lost hiding from the media? What about their tarnished reputations? The ordeals their families had to go through?

Rape charges were dropped against them late last year, and Nifong had to remove himself from the case in shame. Today, the North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper declared all charges dropped against the three, and offered a blistering rebuke of Nifong's actions. "There were many points in the case where caution would have served justice better than bravado," he explained; Nifong will face the North Carolina state bar ethics board in June.  

So, the question is: Now what? Will we learn anything, or will this just become yet another media frenzy about a media frenzy? In the coming weeks, I know CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC will definitely provide more analysis than we would ever want or need --  so let me instead explain what we shouldn't learn from the Duke lacrosse case.  

1. Victims of sexual assault should not be trusted. If anything, this episode proved that jumping to conclusions is not good journalism -- if the media immediately exonerated the defendants, it would have also been illegitimate. This one victim was untrustworthy, and these defendants are innocent -- this has no bearing on any other rape case, any other lacrosse team, or any other stripper. In a perfect world, the media would not jump to conclusions -- but if they must, I would rather they take the side of potential victims and not potential criminals.  

2. Lacrosse is more important than war. As Anderson Cooper pointed out when we were in the middle of another media frenzy, "there's a war on, there's a war on, there's a war on." There are many important things happening in the world, from the Washington showdown over the Iraq supplemental, to the North Korea deal, to climate change. While corruption in the judicial system is important, why not spend more time on bigger cases of corruption, like the one at Department of Justice? This media frenzy has done nothing but hurt everyone involved -- letting it continue would be doing an even greater disservice to the defendants and to an Attorney General's office that has already cleaned itself up.

3. The media is liberal. Conservative or liberal, virtually everyone -- unless you were Ann Coulter -- responded the same way to the allegations in March of last year: with disgust. We are a society that has decided to give rape victims the benefit of the doubt; if the colors, ages, or genders were different, the result would have been the same. The media just reflects what society as a whole thinks: if everyone agrees that the defendants were guilty, its what Wolf Blitzer tells us, and he'll change his tune if the public decides the other way. The press can't sustain opposition to conventional wisdom if it doesn't have support from people in power (its called the indexing hypothesis). So don't blame the media -- blame Washington, pundits, and corrupt attorneys.