Overlooked: Rush To Judgment — Mar 26th 2008

By Dakota Smith

When a bomb went off in Times Square in the early morning hours of March 6, David Karnes, an entertainment lawyer from Los Angeles, became one of the first suspects. Due to a set of circumstances that made him, in the words of one investigator, the "unluckiest person" in the world, he was immediately tried and found guilty by the media. Almost every newspaper account of the bombing referenced Karnes as a possible suspect.

Why was Karnes even mentioned? Shortly before the bombing, he had sent multiple documents, including a photo of himself in front of the Times Square recruiting station, to Democratic members of Congress. The written material expressed the young lawyer's opposition to the Iraq war. And the caption underneath the photo read: "We Did It!" According to Karnes, the photo was part of a holiday card sent to family friends after the 2006 election, now being recycled to congratulate Democratic lawmakers on regaining a congressional majority. Within a couple of days (and after an FBI interrogation), Karnes was cleared of any wrongdoing.

Karnes was hardly the first person to be unjustly smeared by the media. Not everyone, however, gets the chance to air his or her grievances in the editorial pages of a major newspaper. Karnes penned an article in the Los Angeles Times on March 16, recounting his how quickly the media had piled on. He chronicled the rush to judgment he saw in print and on television, and the sarcastic response to his protestations of innocence. (As the Weekly Standard put it: "There's only one way we can know for sure. Waterboard him!")

According to Karnes, what upset him most was that nobody ever got a chance to anyone to read his writings. But in addition to publishing his editorial, the Los Angeles Times--one of the few papers that didn't reference his name in the first place--linked to PDF files of several of his essays. Readers could sample "Memorandum to Democratic Members of Congress," "Common Ground: Rebuilding the Democracy for the New Millennium," and "Elections 2008: Summary of Key Premises."

According to Nicholas Goldberg, editor of the Times' Op-Ed pages, the paper wanted to give readers the chance to study the documents. He also notes that while his department often commissions articles, it was Karnes who approached the paper in this case. "We didn't solicit the piece," explains Goldberg. " But we looked into it and thought it was an interesting story."

For some, the story may bring to mind the tale of Richard Jewell, a security guard who was an initial "person of interest" after the Olympic bombing in Atlanta in 1996. For Propeller user bruhaha, who submitted the story, it was the "bad luck coincidence of the whole thing" that made it worthy of attention. Yet bruhaha also saw a broader theme: "This caught my attention because it showed another case of the media jumping on a story, without the facts. When the story turns out to not be true, and [the media] are forced to admit that they were wrong, they oftentimes bury it where no one sees it. So many of the people who saw the original report still think it was true.... Also, what made this more interesting to me is that it was just some 'Regular Joe' doing what more of us should do: being a part of the political system, being active."

Tags: bombing, David Karnes, Los Angeles Times

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