UVA and the alleged frat rape - Rolling Stone backpedals

Rosen is right. Erdely showed her hand (and future blindspots) the second she called up the person at UVa looking for a story emblematic of campus rape culture. A sensational catchall. Once that is what you're looking for, that's what you'll find, whether the narrative you pick is true or not. She heard what she wanted to hear.

It's hard to report a story when you've already written it in your mind. It's a trap young journalists fall into all the time, and goes down to even some of the most simple gamers. But Erdely should know better.

 

And OBTW ... A 12,000 word review to explain the complete failure by the reporter and editors.
Jesus ... somebody needs an editor.

 

There's a world of difference between looking for a single case that would best illustrate the issue, and what Erdely did.

Campus rape IS a problem, and there's nothing wrong with telling that story through one particularly compelling case.

There's only one catch: That particularly compelling case cannot be made up. Nor can it take the place of even a cursory check of facts.

 

Path dependence ... It's like starting a mathematical proof with a mistake. You can do steps 2 through 2,000 perfectly ... but if you blew it on No. 1., nothing that follows can rescue you.

 

I absolutely agree that campus rape is a problem. A huge one. The most discouraging thing for me about this RS piece has not been an injured journalistic pride, but the damage it did to sexual assault victims and the stigma surrounding reporting rape.

If RS really wanted to explore THAT, they had a lot of cases --a LOT -- already out there that they could have explored in a sweeping look. And you're right, it's fine to use a microcosm of a problem to explore a macrocosm. But if you're framing a story that way before you find it, you leave yourself vulnerable to the trap of hearing what you want to hear. I think Erdely wanted a sensational, all-encompassing case to make her point. Where she went wrong, in my opinion, was not casting a wider net and asking more questions (of more institutions) before settling in on THIS case.

Pre-reporting is underrated. Once so many resources are invested, as exemplified here, the pressure ramps up to make a story worth the expenditure, whether it checks out or not.

 

Hey, in the long run, the story was still worth it:

On-campus activism has continued out of the national media spotlight.

"What Rolling Stone did is gave us the mandate to really work on things that needed to be worked on," said Axler, the student body president. "I think we would have gotten there eventually, but it gave us a sense of urgency. Something we had to do. In some ways, for the long term, that might be a small benefit of an otherwise horrific saga."

Axler added, "The facts of it were wrong, but it wasn't impossible to believe it. What she wrote was fiction, but it was such a believable and horrific thing, it led people to institute reforms."

UVA four months later: 'Rolling Stone didn't do its job' - Apr. 4, 2015

 

Anybody who reads Rolling Stone and doesn't understand it is completely the wet dreams of a bunch of lefties is pretty dumb. This magazine used to be about music and readable.

Now it is just another way overdone preachy left-wing rag that is out to right all the wrongs in society, shame all of the meanies who don't agree with their world view and fabricate bullshit like this to create outrage.

The editors should burn in hell for some of the shit they put out as "journalism"

 

If we start with the premise that one rape is one rape too many, then rape on campus is certainly a problem.

But, as compared to rape off campus, or anywhere else, is it a larger problem -- especially when we consider the age/demographics of college students?

The kind of rape described in the article was not representative at all of the vast majority of campus rapes:

Alex Pinkleton, a friend of Jackie's who was interviewed for the original article, said her primary disappointment is that the story's image of "such a brutal, bloody rape is what many people, including legislators, still have in their mind when they are creating new sexual assault legislation."

But "the reality of campus rape is that around 70% of sexual assaults are by an acquaintance or someone the person knows, alcohol is usually present, and it is rare (if it happens at all) to see any sort of beat down (especially one to the degree of the fabricated story)," she wrote in an email.

UVA four months later: 'Rolling Stone didn't do its job' - Apr. 4, 2015

I keep hearing that colleges and fraternities are addressing these issues, but unless they're prepared to make their campuses and events completely dry, with a zero tolerance policy, not much is going to change.

And, in the pursuit of students, a completely dry campus isn't going to fly.

 

That'll cost RS a little cash.

 

We can cycle back to arguments we had 50 pages ago in this thread, but the confirmation bias was still barely a addressed by the report. It was instead cast as "sensitivity" to Jackie that led to all these problems, as opposed to "I really believe these awful things about the rich patriarchy of places like UVA, so failure to get difficult information is simply more evidence of a cover-up."

The activist, Pinkerton, made a good point somewhere in this mess that I think ought to be a bit of a wake-up call for magazine journalism: Erdley wasn't interested in boring ole rapes. She knew a Hollywood stranger rape would pop, and this one checked a lot of boxes for the kind of story she knew would explode.

Some of this reminds me of the Junod story in Esquire years ago about the trained assassin who now worked as a security guy at a nuclear facility. Junod just kept digging and digging because something wasn't right to him and the fact checker even though so much of what he was saying SEEMED like it could be true. And the brilliance of that piece was that it became a story about deception and the horror of "Wait, who IS this guy?" instead of a story that made blind claims about the US Goverment murdering people.

If a traumatized person, let's say a former White House aide, tells you 9/11 was an inside job or that Bush knew about it beforehand and covered it up, and you ran essentially a one-source story that began with a fake anecdote about Bush getting drunk blowing off the Daily Briefing on bin Laden because he wanted to play golf, and that aide turned out to have been mentally ill, you wouldn't be like "Oh, this is really on the fake whistle blower. Nothing about our process failed. There is some other good stuff in the piece about national security lapses and that's what the piece is really about. Plus it was really hard to get Bush to comment."

 

Nah. A thoroughly independent review found that they were taken in by a very credible fabulist.

Not Rolling Stone's fault at all.