What the Duke Lacrosse Case Says About Journalism

Yeah, I think one big point about what you're saying about these influential people too is they benefit from strife. They benefit from conflict. And so instead of Unitors like Martin Luther King Jr., you have the opposite. You have people that literally benefit from people being divided. They benefit from calling people out or yelling people down or getting conflict going. That gets them more views. That's what's going on with Facebook. That's what the algorithms that people are complaining about that are literally accelerating our path towards some sort of civil war. Yeah. Did you see the social dilemma? I did see the social dilemma. Scary shit, right? Scary shit. And I tell you what I was watching actually on the plane was this, do you remember the Duke lacrosse players? Yes. Do you remember that story? Yes. It reminds people. Dude, the Duke lacrosse players. Whole media had kind of indicted these guys and they loaded this story with class and race. Explain the story to people. It was a bunch of lacrosse players. They had a party, right? A bunch of guys had a party at their house. Yeah, they're uppity white guys. They play lacrosse. So it's like nobody comes from the ghetto and plays lacrosse. So you know that they're arrogant white guys who probably, their father may have like a third. They definitely have a portrait in the foyer of like, this is my uncle, his ties go back to England or whatever. Right. So they're douches. We get it. But they had a party and somebody hired some strippers and the strippers that came were like two POCs. They were POCs. Yeah, POC. And one of them- A lot of people listening are like, oh. POCs are people who historically disenfranchised a little darker melanin tones. People of color. People of color. People of color. And so they came, they stripped. So the girl, they only shipped for like five minutes and the girl was saying weird stuff. Then they got mad. The guys got mad because they felt like they were getting conned, that they didn't get their lap dance worth or whatever, their dancing worth. And then something went awry. And then the girl called the cops and said, I was assaulted. And then from there it became a big story and it ended up that the prosecutor was withholding sculptatory evidence that would have exonerated knowingly. He ended up getting disbarred and doing time because of this. And you look back now and you're going like, that guy was doing exactly what online personalities do now. It's like, this is good for me. I'm in the spotlight. I'm this hero convicting these douchebags. The media is attaching this big social justice cause to it. There's this evidence that clearly my client is lying. Let's just put this aside because all the attention's on me and this is self aggrandizing for me. So I'm benefit forming. I'll just lie and just, you know, there's some evidence that comes that, you know, contradicts what I'm saying. Let's just, because right now I'm a star. And so these kids were maligned by the media, all these journalists writing this horrible stuff about these kids, the culture of the lacrosse players, the privilege, the white privilege, this, that. They did this to this poor black person, you know. And then it was loaded because of Durham because you got Duke and Duke is like the Harvard of the South and then you got poor Durham and then it was all bullshit. It was all bullshit. The DNA exonerated the three kids that were on trial and it ended up, this, this girl was like had some mental health problems. She ended up like killing her boyfriend or something and is in prison like a couple of years later. She was like off, you know, and some, a few journalists apologized, but by that time it was like, you know, now you go to comedy clubs, the joke that comics tell the most if they see a like five like waspy looking white guys, they're like, ah, you guys look like the Duke lacrosse player, like that you use it as a pejorative. So it doesn't matter if it's true because the media made it true. So a lot of people don't even know that they did nothing because the narrative had already been written. Right. That's the problem. That's the problem. The problem is once the narrative gets out there, any, any, if there's some sort of a correction in the newspaper a couple of weeks later, it's always on like the fourth page in the lower right hand corner. Sorry. We have the amendment to the story. Yeah. Turns out nobody raped anybody. Whoops. Yeah. Sorry. Sorry we ruined your life forever. But we sold a lot of papers with that. So that, that isn't a real issue. Here's a real question. Should you be able to make money off the news? It's a good question. It's a good question because if you can make money off the news, then all of a sudden you know, all of a sudden the news becomes a show and the more outrageous you can get it, the more clickbaity you can get it, the more you can sort of jazz up the headlines and distort the story, the more you're going to get people to tune in. If it bleeds, it leads. Yeah. Let's go. I remember when I was working for Fusion, which was like a short lived company under, that was owned by Disney and Univision. It lasted like a year. It was totally like, they tried to build a big studio in Miami and they were trying to target millennials. By that time, like everything was on the phone. People were watching you and it was like, it was just a waste of money. But I remember one of their slogans was like, start a fight. And I was like, really? Yeah. Because my co-hosts were journalists and it was run by journalists and I was like the comedic guy that, you know, they, oh, they had me in a corner and they opened it up and I came in and I was like, woo, ha! To make people laugh. But I was working with like a Peabody award winning journalist, you know, Mariana Atencio and Pedro Andrade. Andrade, he was from Brazil and they were two serious journalists. And the, you know, the executive producer sat it down, it was like, pick a fight. Always look to pick a fight. And I'm like, that sucks. That sucks. Yeah. That should be happening in MMA with the matchmakers, not your news. That's hard to hear. Yeah. Pick a fight. Pick a fight. Because it gets ratings. People love the drama. They love it. If you turned on a real reality TV show, it would just be like a couple of guys sitting around, you know, picking their nose, changing channels. But then if you make a reality, you're like, they tell you. That's not reality. The line producers going, okay, call him the N word now. Like, I don't want to call him the N word. Like, no, trust me. We'll figure out, you know. And then... We'll bleep it out. No one will know what you said. Yeah. Then they let you... Then they start with the N and lead with the R. You're like, hey. I bet you Pac was a really good guy. I bet you they just edited it. Remember Puck from Real World? He was sticking his finger in the peanut butter. Oh, yeah. That's right. He was bullying Pedro. No, no. He was a mess. But the problem with those guys is that you make them more of a mess by shining the camera on them. And then you make them famous. Didn't he, like, lose his marbles after he got off that show? Because he was, like, one of the most famous guys from the real world, other than Theo Vaughn. Yeah. Catch new episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience for free only on Spotify. 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