Enough from Duff Anniversary

KC Johnson has a post regarding the one-year anniversary of Duff Wilson’s much maligned NY Times article in which Sgt. Mark Gottlieb’s immaculately concepted "Magic Notes" first appeared. He also gave us a nice pat on the back for our rapid response to it, which was called Enough from Duff. We wish to thank him for remembering. We urge you all to read his Duff's Anniversary post.

We thought we would give you just a little insight into our response to that article. One of our members saw the Drudge Report byline that a NY Times article regarding the Duke Lacrosse Case was developing. We looked upon that news with trepidation, since the NY Times had previously gotten little if anything right about the case. In fact, as their reporting from the start had been misleading, error ridden, and inflammatory, we fully expected a hit piece.

We went on alert, notifying each other to be ready. When the article finally hit the web, we poured over it. Incredulity soon turned to outrage, as the LieStoppers Team saw the astonishing number of misstatements and falsehoods littering Wilson’s article. Coincidentally, all the "mistakes" were to the benefit of now disbarred, former DA Mike Nifong and the Police investigation.

What Wilson and his editors at the NY Times did not understand was that we and other bloggers had been pouring over this case for over five months, reading everything that Nifong and the press were saying from the very start. One of our members was going to the courthouse and copying the case file. We read the file documents which were not sealed. Our members constantly debated the issues privately and posted on CTV and other message boards discussing the case. And we followed closely the daily posting of Professor KC Johnson in his blog - Durham-in-Wonderland. We've greatly respected and admired KC's work in leading the blog hooligans' dissection of this malicious Hoax.

We also were developing our own team on the ground, so to speak. Yeah, we were amateurs, but we were honestly seeking the truth, not willing to watch from the sidelines and ignorantly accept the dubious, disintegrating narrative that was being pushed by the "professional" press.

From across three time zones, we went to work that night. It was really a group effort from NYC, DC, NC, Ohio, and California. One member in particular was responsible for the basic article with a lot of input from our editor, proof readers, and researchers. I cannot reveal his name because we took a pledge of solidarity and agreed our work would always remain a joint effort. But when the rest of us were temporarily stymied about where to begin our response, due to the sheer enormity of the inaccuracies and outright lies in Wilson's piece, this brilliant young man presented the group a rough draft which closely mirrored the final response which soon appeared to much praise.

He knows who he is. That night we fought the NY Times, and we won!

PS: It was also the night Baldo was created.