Since March 2006, Duke University has found itself in the midst of a media storm generated initially by the allegations and later felony charges of rape and sexual offense against three student athletes. The accuser was a town resident hired to perform as an erotic dancer at a team party. The athletes were players on the school’s highly ranked lacrosse team. She was black; they were white. Faculty, students, and administrators were divided from the outset about how best to understand and respond to — as an institution and as part of the local community — the party, the criminal allegations, the evolution of the court case, and the media’s insistent attention.1 Blog sites followed every nuance of the story, and major publishing houses pursued contracts with writers interested in commenting on what was shaped, repeatedly, as a private university’s very public scandal. The television newsweekly 60 Minutes aired five segments on the topic, and stories appeared in the New Yorker, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, and Sports Illustrated, on the editorial pages of every major newspaper in the country, and on local and national evening newscasts.2 The case was also well covered outside the United States, but not at the same level of intensity.3
