The new book Buffaloed: How Race, Gender, and Media Bias Fueled a Season of Scandal by Bruce Plasket (available from Amazon.com) attempts to debunk the huge national sexual assault scandal that surrounded the University of Colorado football team in 2004. My review of the book for the Rocky Mountain News finds that Plasket is on-target with many of his charges, but he also overstates his case and ignores contrary evidence.

One point about which Plasket is clearly correct in his criticism of media malfeasance is an incident I wrote about in early 2004, when the media treated some unsubstantiated hearsay accusations about two anonymous CU players as if they were plainly true. Likewise, as Plasket accurately notes (and I wrote about earlier this year) the media gave scant attention to the exoneration of two CU football players who were accused of raping a woman they met at a bar in 2003.