The Bill Cosby scandal continues to simmer in the public eye, to the point where even the media is unexpectedly becoming self-reflective. This weekend journalist David Carr published a piece in the New York Times calling out himself and his colleagues for pushing aside the question of Cosby’s sexual misconduct.

As summarized in E! Online’s convenient timeline of events, stand-up comic Hannibal Buress referred to iconic comedian Bill Cosby as a “rapist” in a show on October 16th. The clip went viral, opening an apparently gigantic can of worms. Eight women have come forward since the clip to report they were assaulted or raped by Cosby, joining a chorus of previous accusers from as far back as the 60’s, summarized in an article on Sunday in the Washington Post. Cosby has had multiple appearances and professional projects canceled.

In regards to the information surfacing and the career repercussions, Carr’s piece Calling Out Bill Cosby’s Media Enablers, Including Myself asks the question, “what took so long?” The author of a 2011 Q&A with Cosby, Carr takes responsibility for joining the ranks of journalists or other media investigators by not pushing for answers to the persistent rumors. He admits that, “No one wanted to disturb the Natural Order of Things, which was that Mr. Cosby was beloved; that he was as generous and paternal as his public image; and that his approach to live and work presented a bracing corrective to the coarse, self-defeating urban black ethos. Only the first of those things was actually true.”

Carr acknowledges that “it fell to a comic, not an investigative reporter or biographer, to speak truth to entertainment power.” He also writes regretfully that he and his fellow journalists, “let down the women who were brave enough to speak out publicly against a powerful entertainer.”