https://hotair.com/archives/2006/08/11/williams-says-comparison-was-aggressively-misunderstood/
“Aggressively Misunderstood” – You God Damn pack of numb nuts just shut the hell up, quit thinking and believe what I tell you to believe.

“Fake But Accurate”

We got ahead of the news cycle.

There is a major contradiction between our version of the story and what was reported.

We’re going to stand down on this story.

https://michellemalkin.com/archives/005719.htm
Calame asked Keller why he lied, although Calame didn’t quite put it that way. Keller says he used “inelegant” wording in his description, but

https://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110010350#narrative

https://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=4379

‘The Narrative Was Right, but the Facts Were Wrong’
Rachel Smolkin of the American Journalism Review, in a post-mortem on the Duke rape hoax and journalists’ credulity in reporting it, relays a damning quote:

Perhaps the most complex lessons about the media coverage of the Duke case involve issues of narrative. Unquestionably, the media too readily ran with a simplistic storyline, sacrificing a search for truth. Not only were the accused innocent of rape, the allegations of racial taunts that received so much media attention appear to have been exaggerated.

“We fell into a stereotype of the Duke lacrosse players,” says Newsweek’s Evan Thomas. “It’s complicated because there is a strong stereotype [that] lacrosse players can be loutish, and there’s evidence to back that up. There’s even some evidence that that the Duke lacrosse players were loutish, and we were too quick to connect those dots.”

But he adds: “It was about race. Nifong’s motivations clearly were rooted in his need to win black votes. There were tensions between town and gown, that part was true. The narrative was properly about race, sex and class. . . . We went a beat too fast in assuming that a rape took place. . . . We just got the facts wrong. The narrative was right, but the facts were wrong.”

If the facts are wrong, though, why explore the narrative at all? Is it fair to use the Duke lacrosse players to tell a larger story of athletes run wild–a theme that appeared not only on sports pages but also was splashed, repeatedly, on the front pages of major newspapers and amplified on cable shoutfests? Says [KC] Johnson [an early skeptic of the case]: Once the facts are “proven not to be true, you certainly have to consider whether the narrative is relevant.”

“The narrative was right, but the facts were wrong.” This is reminiscent of the “fake but accurate” defense of CBS’s Bush National Guard hoax. If Thomas were giving a plainer account of what happened, he would have said something like this: Our reporting was guided by our prejudices, and even though the story turned out to be false, we stand behind our prejudices.