| UVA Rape Story Collapses; Duke Lacrosse Redux | |
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| abb | Dec 7 2014, 08:32 PM Post #166 |
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Greek leaders go on the offensive at UVA By Maggie Severns 12/7/14 8:20 PM EST National fraternity and sorority leaders are calling on the University of Virginia to reinstate its Greek system, which the university suspended after an article in Rolling Stone that is now in dispute chronicled an alleged gang rape at a campus fraternity. Greek leaders say they would like the university to apologize, publicly release records that explain the basis of its decision to suspend the Greek system and outline how it will restore the reputation of fraternities and students at the university. The requests were outlined Sunday in a joint statement by leaders of the Fraternity and Sorority Political Action Committee, the National Panhellenic Conference and the North American Interfraternity Conference. “We believe universities must demonstrate more respect for the fundamental rights to due process and freedom of association for students and student organizations when allegations of misconduct are lodged,” the statement said. “A rush to judgment on campus all too often turns out to be wrong, especially when applied at the organizational level.” Fraternities and sororities, whose image was marred by the Rolling Stone account, are planning a sweeping offensive for the coming weeks. Sunday’s statement was just the first step: The groups are considering a Freedom of Information Act request to uncover the university’s basis for suspending the Greek system and could take legal action should the University of Virginia not reinstate the chapters, according to a source familiar with the thinking of the national fraternities and sororities. Individual fraternities and sororities will be reaching out to the university to ask it to take action and reinstate the Greek system as well, the source said. The chapters have been suspended until Jan. 9, though the suspensions could last longer. They’re also looking to Washington for help. A group of fraternities has hired former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and Squire Patton Boggs to lobby Congress for changes in how campuses address sexual assault incidents. “Congress needs to take a comprehensive approach to fixing these problems so that every case is handled in a manner that is fair, balanced and provides the full measure of constitutional protections to all parties,” Lott said in a statement. Several members of Congress have been pushing to reform policies related to campus sexual assault in recent months, most notably Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), who issued a survey this spring probing the way campuses handle reports of sexual assault. The fraternity and sorority leaders said in their statement that Congress should examine whether the public interest “is being served by forcing sexual assault cases into a campus judicial process” and that the on-campus process lacks “the necessary skill sets, resources and capability needed to reach the right decision.” The Rolling Stone story, published in late November, described a brutal assault at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity at UVA. But details of the story have since been called into question by both the local chapter of Phi Kappa Psi fraternity and The Washington Post, which vetted the story independently. The fraternity said Friday that it did not host a party on the night in question, and that none of its members worked at the campus Aquatic and Fitness Center — as the victim had alleged in the story — at the time. The article was still posted on the Rolling Stone website Sunday night, but the magazine on Friday added an extensive editor’s note acknowledging that parts of the story may not be true. The note also said it was a mistake for the magazine to not try to contact the alleged attackers. The University of Virginia did not immediately return a request for comment. But University President Teresa Sullivan emphasized last week that the new focus on curbing sexual assault on campus, catalyzed by the article, shouldn’t be compromised because of the doubts over the victim’s account. Jean Mrasek, the chairwoman of the National Panhellenic Conference, which represents sororities, said in a statement that the group has “asked for a seat at the table” in the university’s conversation about changing sexual assault policies. But the group believes that suspending the sororities on campus doesn’t resolve the situation “and in fact, we believe it further complicates the issues at hand,” Mrasek said. Authors: Maggie Severns mseverns@politico.com Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/12/uva-greek-system-rolling-stone-113385.html#ixzz3LGXWnuNO |
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| sdsgo | Dec 7 2014, 08:43 PM Post #167 |
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Greek leaders go on the offensive at UVA By Maggie Severns 12/7/14 8:20 PM EST
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| cks | Dec 7 2014, 09:21 PM Post #168 |
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As well they should. I have never been able to understand the willingness that exists to condemn the Greek system. Sometimes I think it is a function of those who are still harboring resentments because they did not get into the sorority or fraternity that they desired. For the record I belonged to a sorority in college (on my own terms as I was neither anti-Greek nor particularly pro-Greek and wound up as an officer my senior year). Mr. cks was not Greek. It was interesting that the group that we hung with in college all the girls were Greek but the guys were not. All of our children went Greek - each of the boys was in a different fraternity. While my oldest son was involved with his fraternity very little by his senior year, the other two were very active and were officers. My daughter had sort of the same relationship with her sorority as I did with mine - we were involved on our own terms. Let us assume for a moment that Jackie's story was true and that at one fraternity what she alleged happened. That did not mean that all other fraternities should have been closed. Furthermore, what does that have to do with the sororities......is it guilt by association? This is the same sort of muddled headed thinking that seems to afflict our political leaders - that because one policeman employs a chokehold incorrectly that all police - because they are police are somehow guilty of improper procedures, or racism, or whatever the charge of the moment might be. |
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| abb | Dec 8 2014, 05:49 AM Post #169 |
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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/08/business/media/rolling-stone-tries-to-regroup-after-campus-rape-article-is-disputed.html?_r=0 Rolling Stone Tries to Regroup After Campus Rape Article Is Disputed By RAVI SOMAIYADEC. 7, 2014 Photo Will Dana, managing editor of Rolling Stone, wrote a note on its campus rape story. Credit Richard Perry/The New York Times Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story Share This Page Share Tweet Save more Continue reading the main story Started nearly a half-century ago as a chronicle of 1960s counterculture, Rolling Stone established its journalistic credibility with provocative coverage of politics and current affairs. While its cover remains coveted real estate for those looking to assert their pop-culture bona fides, writers like Matt Taibbi and Michael Hastings have influenced public perceptions in recent years on issues like the financial crisis and the war in Afghanistan — in the same way that celebrated predecessors like Richard Ben Cramer and Tom Wolfe had done in previous years. The magazine seemed to have struck again last month with a vivid account of a young woman who said she was gang-raped at a University of Virginia fraternity party, a story that helped drive the national debate over the problem of sexual assault on college campuses. Continue reading the main story Related Coverage Gary DePalo, a sophomore at the University of Virginia, said there was a general sense on campus of “I just want this semester to be over.” After Retreat on Rolling Stone Article, Virginia Campus Still UneasyDEC. 6, 2014 Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. The woman at the center of a Rolling Stone article said this was where she was raped by several men in 2012. Rolling Stone Cites Doubts on Its Story of University of Virginia RapeDEC. 5, 2014 But late last week Rolling Stone found itself facing a crisis that threatened its reputation as a place for serious, significant journalism. Faced with reporting in The Washington Post that appeared to undermine crucial details of the accuser’s account, and a rebuttal of some aspects from the fraternity, the magazine published a note to readers on Friday saying that it had reservations about the article. It also acknowledged that it had erred in relying solely on the word of the accuser, named only as Jackie, and in agreeing not to try to contact the men she accused. “I have serious questions about what happened, and I am at this point not ready to say what happened that night,” the magazine’s managing editor, Will Dana, said in an interview Friday. “There should never be a story in Rolling Stone where I feel that way.” With that, Rolling Stone found itself listed among a series of media crises in recent weeks, including The New Republic, where there were mass resignations, and First Look Media, the start-up that lost staff members and canceled a planned website after a dispute between journalists and managers. Rolling Stone was harshly criticized by media critics for its journalistic lapses, and by women’s groups who said it set back the cause of encouraging sexual assault victims to come forward. Even the magazine’s apology seemed to backfire. The note to readers initially said that Rolling Stone’s trust in Jackie was “misplaced” — which some read as criticizing Jackie and undermining her story. This weekend, as it faced further criticism for that characterization, it quietly changed the note to say that it was “mistaken in honoring Jackie’s request to not contact the alleged assaulters to get their account.” It also said, “These mistakes are on Rolling Stone, not on Jackie.” In a post on Twitter, Mr. Taibbi said he, like others at the magazine, was “both mortified and sorry — for the public, for anyone affected, and for the source herself.” Jann Wenner, a founder of Rolling Stone and its publisher, declined repeatedly to be interviewed, or to offer any comment. But in the interview Friday, Mr. Dana said the article stemmed from a feeling he and other senior editors had over summer that the issue of unpunished campus rapes would make a compelling and important story. Continue reading the main story They decided to assign Sabrina Rubin Erdely, a contributing editor who has also written for GQ and The New Yorker, and who has been nominated for two National Magazine awards, according to her website. Ms. Erdely did not return calls and messages seeking comment. But she has said publicly that she sought out the right story, on the right campus, and that she found what she was looking for in Jackie. The accuser appeared to be distressed, perhaps as a result of her trauma, according to a person familiar with the newsroom’s process, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to describe sensitive events. She had repeatedly asked Ms. Erdely that those she accused of raping her not be contacted. When the magazine brought up the issue again later, she threatened to withdraw from the story. That concern, combined with a feeling that it should err on the side of sensitivity, persuaded the magazine to accept her wishes. “Sabrina had talked to quite a few other women who had said, ‘If you talk to me, you can’t go talk to my attacker,’ ” Mr. Dana said, and so it seemed like a reasonable request. “These are hard stories to do,” said Bruce Shapiro, executive director of Columbia University’s Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, which focuses on the issues of reporting on violence and conflict. An engaged and empathetic reporter, he said, will naturally be concerned about potentially inflicting new trauma on the victim of a harrowing incident. “I do think that when the emotional valence of a story is this high, you really have to verify it.” Experienced reporters on the topic, he said, often only work with women who feel strong enough to deal with the due diligence required to bring the article to publication. The details of a heartbreaking conversation recounted in the story, in which Jackie tells her friends of her rape and is told that she should stay quiet, also came only from Jackie, Mr. Dana said. One of the friends declined to comment, and Ms. Erdely could not reach the others. The magazine faces some potential legal liability, said Eugene Volokh, a University of California, Los Angeles, law professor who also writes for The Washington Post. “Based on the facts as I have read about them in the media,” he said, “I would not have approved the publication of a story that names a fraternity, when there hadn’t been a call to the alleged rapists.” Ms. Erdely delivered a manuscript in September. When he first read it, Mr. Dana said, “I thought, ‘Are you sure?’ ” But he, other editors and fact-checkers felt that Jackie was credible, and the magazine’s lawyers had no problems with it, so the magazine ran it. After publication, Jackie seemed pleased, too, Mr. Dana said. But others wrote that they had problems with the article, and with the magazine’s decision not to seek out the men accused. Mr. Dana said that, despite the barrage of criticism, Rolling Stone had not suspected that anything might be significantly wrong until late last week. The magazine said on Sunday that it had not identified specific problems in the article beyond the questions that had already been made public, but said it is investigating further. It is not clear what consequences Ms. Erdely and the article’s editor will face, if any, Mr. Dana said, and he has not made any specific decisions. Mr. Shapiro, of the Dart Center, said the issue of corroboration in accounts of rape and other trauma is a common one. He says that more reporters should be trained in interviewing traumatized people, to protect both themselves and their sources. “It would be really unfortunate if the controversy around the sourcing of this story were to distract from the core and critical issue of sexual assault on college campuses,” he said, an issue with which Mr. Dana said he agreed. Mr. Dana said the magazine planned to do further reporting on the story, as it tries to determine the truth of what happened at the University of Virginia and rebuild its own journalistic reputation. “Right now,” he said, “we’re picking up the pieces.” Ben Sisario contributed reporting |
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| abb | Dec 8 2014, 05:50 AM Post #170 |
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/how-rolling-stones-campus-rape-story-could-discourage-victims-from-speaking-out/2014/12/07/a06a30aa-7e51-11e4-9f38-95a187e4c1f7_story.html How Rolling Stone’s campus rape story could discourage victims from speaking out Students held a candlelight vigil to raise awareness on sexual assault Friday night as Rolling Stone cited “discrepancies” in an article that reported a gang rape in a campus fraternity. (Reuters) By Jessica Contrera and Sarah Kaplan December 7 at 7:55 PM When a Rolling Stone article titled “A Rape on Campus” appeared in Zoe Ridolfi-Starr’s inbox last month, she clicked on it immediately. The Columbia University senior was gripped by the nearly 9,000-word feature, which focused on a University of Virginia student called Jackie who said she was gang-raped at a fraternity during her fourth week of college. Shocking though it was, the Rolling Stone piece offered some catharsis: In Jackie’s story, Ridolfi-Starr saw parallels to her own experience — she says that she was raped by two men at a fraternity party the summer after her freshman year. In Rolling Stone’s coverage, she saw a validation of her efforts as an anti-rape activist. Perhaps, she thought, the media was finally starting to take the epidemic of rape on college campuses seriously. Two weeks later, Ridolfi-Starr sat in front of her computer reading another Rolling Stone piece: an editor’s note, dated Dec. 5, in which Managing Editor Will Dana responded to questions about the story’s accuracy. “In the face of new information, there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie’s account, and we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced,” he wrote. 1 of 20 Full Screen Autoplay Nov. 24, 2014 Nov. 22, 2014 Protests at U-Va. after sexual assault allegations View Photos A Rolling Stone article about a student who says she was gang raped at a fraternity has set off anger and debate about campus culture, although key elements of that account are now in doubt. A Rolling Stone article about a student who says she was gang raped at a fraternity has set off anger and debate about campus culture, although key elements of that account are now in doubt. “I read that note, and I felt nauseous,” Ridolfi-Starr recalled. The magazine that had devoted so much room to a story on campus rape was explaining that it hadn’t contacted the alleged attackers or corroborated many crucial elements of the story. Now, it appeared to be blaming the inaccuracies on Jackie. “They threw a vulnerable young woman under the bus,” said Ridolfi-Starr, who is co-founder of the campus group No Red Tape and one of 23 students to file a Title IX complaint against Columbia for its handling of sexual assault cases. “And what does that say to other survivors, who often struggle with decisions about how and whether to report?” That’s what advocates against sexual assault fear most: that the way the magazine handled one young woman’s story, and the high-profile scrutiny it received, will stop other victims from coming forward. In their eyes, the past few years have been ones of incredible momentum for their cause. Campus sexual assaults have been getting attention from the White House; the federal departments of Education and Justice have launched investigations into the handling of cases at specific universities; and the media have been telling stories of victims turned advocates. There were multiple reports of fraternities, which are often perceived as hubs for assaults, working to improve their rape-prevention efforts. Again and again, groups were recognizing publicly that, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly one in five women has been raped. At first, the Rolling Stone piece seemed to add to this momentum. Then, after days of scrutiny on the magazine’s reporting practices, its managing editor discredited the story’s most prominent source in a statement Friday. By Sunday, that statement had been changed to include language that shifted responsibility away from Jackie and onto Rolling Stone and its judgment in its reporting and editing process. But the damage had been done, said Jaclyn Friedman, who co-edited a book on rape culture titled “Yes Means Yes.” “People are calling [Jackie] a liar and calling this a hoax based on the fact that Rolling Stone said their faith in her had been misplaced,” Friedman said. The broader message of the Rolling Stone story that writer Sabrina Rubin Erdely said she intended — that U-Va. and other colleges discourage public reporting of sexual assault — has fallen out of the discussion, while the focus has shifted to whether the particulars of Jackie’s account are factual. “This is the danger in holding up an individual’s case and asking them to symbolize the entire system of violence,” Friedman said. That individual can also become the target of online vitriol and harassment, as appeared to happen to Jackie over the weekend, when a Twitter user published what he claimed was her full name and threatened to disclose more personal details. Advocates against sexual violence say the fallout from this situation could have a number of devastating effects on current and future victims. Among them is that major news outlets will be hesitant to invest resources into coverage of sexual assault for fear of the type of backlash Rolling Stone has encountered. Telling individual stories of rape can often be complicated by the possible memory fragmentation of the victim, the issue of naming the perpetrator and a lack of documentation that is typically available for other types of violent crime. Reporting on sexual assaults on college campuses is particularly difficult. The explicit violence in the experience Jackie relayed makes her story something of an outlier, said Dana Bolger, founding co-director of Know Your IX, an organization that works to end campus rape. More often, sexual assaults in college occur in situations where the level of consent is likely to be called into question. “Rape in college looks like rape by a friend, by a partner, rape when someone is incapacitated or unconscious,” Bolger said. “All of these are real experiences of violence that don’t look like what we traditionally point to as violence.” Media attention to the discrepancies in Jackie’s account — and Rolling Stone’s implication that she was untrustworthy — could also reinforce the idea that false rape allegations are the norm. “I’m really expecting people to look at this and point to this as a reason not to believe our stories,” said Amanda Gould, a sophomore at American University who sits on the board of the campus group Students Against Sexual Violence. Jennifer Marsh, who, as vice president of victim services at the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN), oversees the National Sexual Assault Hotline, says she worries that fear of not being believed could deter victims from reporting a crime. “We hear people citing TV shows and news headlines daily on the hotline,” Marsh said. “In some ways, it works to our advantage, if there was a PSA that encouraged them to come to the hotline. In the reverse, they call and say, ‘I’m afraid to tell anybody. Nobody is going to believe me because of’ insert whatever story, in which they saw another victim questioned or disbelieved.” Despite these concerns, activists are heartened by the attention a story about campus rape has received and says they hope it can further their momentum rather than halt it. That seems to be what is happening at U-Va., where the school’s administration announced that its investigation into its practices will continue and the president of the school’s Inter-Fraternity Council has said the group will likewise keep its focus on reform. Victims nationwide, including Ridolfi-Starr, will push to replicate that pressure for change at other universities. “I think that the attention paid even to this controversy is evidence of the fact that this issue is not going to go away,” Ridolfi-Starr said. “You can try to pick apart these stories and discredit details, but it’s still happening.” Jessica Contrera is a staff writer at the Washington Post. |
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| abb | Dec 8 2014, 05:52 AM Post #171 |
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/12/08/the-epic-rolling-stone-gang-rape-fallout-and-how-major-publications-get-it-wrong/ The epic Rolling Stone gang-rape fallout — and how major publications get it wrong By Terrence McCoy December 8 at 5:06 AM Among the first to perceive cracks in the facade of Rolling Stone’s piece on campus gang rape was editor Richard Bradley. On Nov. 24, days before The Washington Post reported problems with the piece and Rolling Stone confessed its failings, Bradley said he smelled something fishy. “I’m not convinced that this gang rape actually happened,” he wrote on Nov. 24. “Something about this story doesn’t feel right.” He should know. He once edited Stephen Glass, the notorious fabulist who authored a series of made-up stories for the New Republic and other publications. Glass had turned in a piece on Bill Clinton pal Vernon Jordan, the famous Washington lawyer. Bradley assigned Glass to “dig up some dirt on Jordan,” as he told it in Salon. And boy, did he ever. It purportedly exposed Jordan as a creep — but in the end was “proved to be fake, filled with fabrications.” Journalists pride themselves on their skepticism. But this one, Bradley said, passed his smell-test because it exploited pre-existing biases. It took what he already believed to be true about Jordan and appeared to substantiate it. “Stephen wrote what he knew I was inclined to believe,” Bradley wrote on his blog. “And because I was inclined to believe it, I abandoned my critical judgement. I lowered my guard.” Lots of things can make otherwise skeptical reporters and editors lower their guard. The story is so good. The writing is so good. It’s such an important issue. The resulting journalism scandals run the spectrum of the industry’s cardinal sins. They include the worst: Janet Cooke’s Pulitzer Prize-winning forgery in The Post on a phantom 8-year-old heroin addict named Jimmy. They include less severe sins: those of omission, and when sources get things wrong. And those somewhere in the middle: ideological-driven journalism. Like one of Tolstoy’s unhappy families, every such piece is defective in its own way. And to be sure, Rolling Stone’s was too. Only some of the details are known: On Nov. 19, the respected magazine published a blockbuster of an article by Sabrina Rubin Erdely that told the story of “Jackie.” The 18-year-old college freshman claimed seven frat brothers had gang-raped her in a three-hour episode. The piece generated a lot of what journalists like to call “impact.” The university suspended all frats. A criminal investigation was initiated. A national debate on campus gang-rape flared. But now, thanks in large part to the reporting of the Post’s T. Rees Shapiro, the piece was found to be flawed: Erdely didn’t speak to numerous key sources, and Jackie’s recitation of what transpired that night appears suspect. The biggest question to emerge from the whole history of flawed — or worse — journalism is how such stories get published in the first place. How do reporters and editors at reputable publications allow these things to happen? What mechanisms fail? A look at modern journalism scandals shows some broad similarities. Many flawed stories had anonymous sources whose information couldn’t be corroborated. In other cases, a reporter was reluctant to press a source believed to be a victim. And in nearly all of them, as Bradley warned, the pieces appeared to mold pre-existing views into narratives that neatly reflected them. But in the history of big retractions, there are few, if any, that stemmed from stories that went against the prevailing wind. “One must be most critical about stories that play into existing biases,” he wrote. “And this story nourishes a lot of them: biases against fraternities, against men, against the South; biases about the naivete of young women, especially Southern women; pre-existing beliefs about the prevalence — indeed, the existence — of rape culture; extant suspicions about the hostility of university bureaucracies to sexual assault complaints that can produce unflattering publicity.” The same thing happened, but in very different conditions, with Janet Cooke and her tale of Jimmy in the early 1980s. At the time, the nation’s capital was in the throes of a heroin epidemic, and “stories of heroin use in the city were running regularly,” Post ombudsman Bill Green wrote in a lengthy dissection of the story. “… The stories reported on an increase in the crime rate, a drug dealer receiving a 40-year sentence, vast new drug traffic via Turkey, an indictment of a Northeast man on a drug count, hearings on heroin use by patients dying of cancer, a life sentence for a drug-related killing and 19 arrests in two major local drug rings.” The tale of an anonymous 8-year-old boy addicted to heroin — a victim of circumstance who deserved sympathy, not scrutiny — seemed an intuitive progression in the narrative. And that’s what made it so dangerous. A similar theme emerged in 2005. In May of that year, Newsweek alleged American interrogators at the detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had flushed a copy of the Koran down the toilet. News filtered to Afghanistan and Pakistan, where protests erupted, killing four people and injuring 60 others. The story, based on an anonymous source, turned out to be untrue — but many at first believed it. “It is important to remember that the public had already heard claims of prison abuse at Guantanamo Bay, and therefore the story, if unable to be proven, still seemed plausible,” wrote Michelle Bova of Carnegie Mellon University. In a similar scenario, the New York Times published a series of stories on a scientist named Wen Ho Lee, who it said was suspected of stealing secrets from a U.S. nuclear arsenal and handing them over to the Chinese. A federal investigation later exonerated Lee, and the Times acknowledged it “found some things we wish we had done differently in the course of the coverage to give Dr. Lee the full benefit of the doubt.” As with many other flawed stories, it fit into a broader pattern of coverage at the time. In previous years, a flurry of stories had appeared in newspapers alleging various partnerships between powerful American and Chinese parties. “House Speaker Newt Gingrich created a committee to investigate whether the Clinton administration or U.S. companies gave information or technology to China that helped it make nuclear weapons,” wrote Lucinda Fleeson in American Journalism Review, endowing later stories with a broader sense of public legitimacy. And then there’s Jackie. So much made sense. Creepy frat guys. Rape. Feckless university response. A lot of stories about rape culture in America and on campuses — and Rolling Stone looking for a story to illustrate it. As Washington Post media critic Eric Wemple wrote: “There’s ample evidence of poisonous biases that landed Rolling Stone in what should be an existential crisis. It starts with this business about choosing just the ‘right’ school for the story.” Of course, news organizations are always competing for stories that are emblematic of timely trends or social problems, most of which don’t produce retractions or apologies. “The lesson I learned,” wrote Bradley, Glass’s editor at George, is that “One must be most critical, in the best sense of that word, about what one is already inclined to believe.” RELATED: Key elements of Rolling Stone’s U-Va. gang rape allegations in doubt Conservatives say Rolling Stone U-Va. rape story exposes the liberal narrative Terrence McCoy writes on foreign affairs for The Washington Post's Morning Mix. Follow him on Twitter here. |
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| abb | Dec 8 2014, 05:53 AM Post #172 |
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http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/20404/ ‘I am mad’ – UVA student speaks out against Rolling Stone rape story by Emily Irwin - University of Virginia on December 8, 2014 FIX FEATURE OPINION CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. – The Nov. 19 Rolling Stone “A Rape on Campus” article by Sabrina Rubin Erdely details an account of a female student’s brutal assault at a fraternity house at University of Virginia two years ago. As a student at the University of Virginia, as well as a sorority member, I can say with certainty that reading it punched a hole through all of our hearts here on campus. So now – to learn the article is based on unsubstantiated, uncorroborated, and possibly completely falsified allegations – we are concerned, disappointed, even outraged. I personally have experienced a sundry wave of emotions regarding the whole affair: shock, sadness, confusion. But mostly, I am mad. I am mad … that nobody seemed to question this story from the start. This was a gruesome, almost unbelievable story of gang rape, which is a disgustingly brutal and horrifying act. However, Erdely describes how Jackie was gang raped by seven men in a fraternity house, including two student supervisors who looked on, making nine people involved that night. I struggled to believe these atrocities could have gone on for so long in a fraternity without anyone discovering, and that this many men could lack consciences and morals in committing to this “pledging” ritual. Not to mention UVa fraternities conduct the pledging process in the spring – not the fall – which doesn’t add up when considering this alleged rape took place on a night in September 2012. I am mad … that our university was misrepresented.Emily Erdely describes “throngs of toned, tanned, and overwhelmingly blond students” at UVa, as well as other false exaggerations about the culture here. I’m not exactly sure which campus she visited, but when I walk across mine, I see immense ethnic diversity. Moreover, it is hard to believe the claim that Jackie’s friends did nothing to help her when she came to them that night. That certainly doesn’t sound like the community I know and love at UVa. I am mad … that people are afraid to speak their minds for fear of being labeled and attacked. Although many of us readers, especially those at UVa, questioned certain aspects of the story, everyone seemed afraid to challenge it publicly at first. In the back of our minds we asked ourselves: Why would this girl just make up this story? If I do speak out publicly asking for more evidence, will people accuse me of being pro-rape? What if people say I am ignoring the real problem at hand of sexual assault and rape and the way universities handle them by questioning the story’s reliability? None of us wanted to say these questions out loud. But we had every right to. I am mad … at the unfair light in which this article has painted Greek Life. As a result of this story, many faculty members at UVa and activists in the Charlottesville community and beyond have banded together in favor of abolishing fraternities and sororities altogether. Already Greek events on campus have been suspended through the end of the year. As a sorority member at UVa, I can speak to the incredible aspects of being in a sisterhood and the impact we have in our community through service and leadership. What’s more, this has been an extremely difficult semester, with the disappearance and murder of Hannah Graham and two student deaths. We, the women who live in danger of sexual assault and rape, have come together in these hard times to support, love, and motivate one another toward change. To disband our support system would be antithetical to solving the problem. I am mad … at the way Rolling Stone put the blame on Jackie last Friday when they admitted to publishing a factually incorrect story. They stated their “trust in Jackie was misplaced,” until they discreetly edited their apology Saturday to change this accusatory statement. While we still wait for many questions to be answered, it is not and never will be the survivor’s fault. Perhaps Jackie experienced post-traumatic stress disorder from that night, blurring facts and details of the events? Maybe Erdely changed or embellished Jackie’s story? We do not know what happened on that night, but we know that Erdely did not uphold her journalistic responsibility to confirm the existence of the accused and attempt to interview them. That alone is enough evidence that Rolling Stone should have immediately acknowledged their own blame in the publishing of this story. Furthermore, everyone seemed to largely ignore the credibility of Rolling Stone as a “news” publication. Let’s remember Rolling Stone has been notorious for publishing controversial, exaggerated stories to seize public attention. Recall its infamous magazine cover from last year, flaunting a photo-shopped, attractive headshot of the Boston marathon bomber. Americans were outraged at that horrible portrayal of the terrorist, by the same news publication that we immediately believed to be reliable in November. Lastly, but most importantly, I am mad … on behalf of sexual assault and rape survivors. An article by The Verge titled “Rolling Stone just wrecked an incredible year of progress for rape victims” explains how detrimental the destroyed credibility of this article will be for survivors. They have struggled and could continue to struggle for years to come to convince others to believe their stories of sexual assault and rape, even though statistics show that the percentages of false sexual assault reports are exceptionally low. It takes one article like this to go viral, and then be proven inaccurate, to devastate the monumental progress that I have already seen taking place at UVa, and at other campuses across the nation. Ultimately, this is a lesson about journalism. Journalism can be used to promote remarkable progress for issues like sexual assault and rape—issues that deserve to be at the forefront of public attention. Yet simultaneously, it can hurt this progress as well. We must question news reports, while recognizing that this does not mean we are questioning the issues at hand. College Fix contributor Emily Irwin is a student at the University of Virginia. |
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| abb | Dec 8 2014, 05:54 AM Post #173 |
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/12/08/the-conservative-narrative-on-rolling-stone-rape-story-is-that-it-exposes-the-liberal-narrative/ Conservatives say Rolling Stone U-Va. rape story exposes the liberal narrative By Justin Moyer December 8 at 2:55 AM Conservatives are having a field day with Rolling Stone’s flawed article about an alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia — as liberals and advocates work on damage control. Jeffrey Lord, Newsbusters: “The narrative was a left-wing favorite. A bunch of well-to-do white frat boys at an elite university engaged in violent gang-banging when not studying to be even richer white professionals. What better story for Rolling Stone to play the leftist game that narrative journalism has become. The story had everything the left professes to detest. White boys. Money earned from those bastard capitalists. An exclusive fraternity at an exclusive elite university. And above all — thank you Jesus! — sex!” Matthew Continetti, Washington Free Beacon: Just-so stories, extravagant assertions, heated denunciations, empty gestures, moral posturing that increases in intensity the further removed it is from the truth: If the mainstream narration of our ethnic, social, and cultural life is susceptible to error, it is because liberalism is the prevailing disposition of our institutions of higher education, of our media, of our nonprofit and public sectors, and it is therefore cocooned from skepticism and incredulity and independent thought. Sometimes the truth punctures the bubble. And when that happens — and lately it seems to be happening with increasing frequency — liberalism itself goes on trial. Has the jury reached a verdict? Yes, your honor, it has. We find the defendant guilty. Liberalism is a hoax. Wall Street Journal: In other words, Ms. Erdely did not construct a story based on facts, but went looking for facts to fit her theory. She appears to have been looking for a story to fit the current popular liberal belief that sexual assault is pervasive and pervasively covered-up. Now that the story has begun to fall apart, it’s worth considering the damage. Though it may never get as far as the bogus 2006 rape charges against the students of the Duke lacrosse team, members of the UVA chapter of Phi Kappa Psi will have to live with undeservedly tainted personal reputations, especially since the charges may never be decisively refuted. UVA has also taken an unfair blow to its reputation. Nor can the story do any good for the broader interest of preventing future campus sexual assaults. We live in an era of politically driven narratives — particularly about race, class and gender — which the media often use to assert “truths” before bothering to ascertain facts. Last month in Ferguson, Missouri, and now at UVA, we’ve seen the harm those narratives can do. The flawed story fits into a “politically driven narrative” popular with conservatives, that liberals, academics and what they call the liberal media are obsessed with stories of “victimization.” “Consider the supposed campus epidemic of rape, a.k.a. ‘sexual assault,’” columnist George F. Will wrote in June. “Academia is learning that its attempts to create victim-free campuses — by making everyone hypersensitive, even delusional, about victimizations — brings increasing supervision by the regulatory state that progressivism celebrates.” Others blamed Erdely and what they call the mainstream media’s culture of victimization. “She seems more eager to talk about public policy than the facts she reported,” National Review’s Jonah Goldberg wrote of Erdely, before Rolling Stone acknowledged “discrepancies” in the story. “The same goes for much of the media, which have yet to independently corroborate the story, loading it instead with context about the ‘rape epidemic’ and evidence supporting the questionable statistic that 1 in 5 college women are sexually assaulted.” Sponsor Generated Content Smart parking to the rescue By Xerox Through technology and data, parking systems are improving city congestion. READ MORE Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, liberal journalists were trying to defend the cause, if not the story. A commentator on MSNBC said we should look to the larger lessons of the Rolling Stone piece. “It is so hard for so many of these victims to come forward,” Katie Hunt said on the network. “And clearly, the woman at the center of this story had something terrible and traumatic happen to her. And now the magazine is struggling to figure out which details line up right and which ones don’t. And that’s on them. But every time something like this happens, it sets back the overall goal of making sure victims are believed.” And advocates pressed on, narrative be damned. “Actually, campus activists have been disputing one aspect of the story all along”: Rolling Stone’s “depiction of them as quiescent,” Victoria Olwell, an organizer of a protest rally at U-Va. after the magazine story came out, told the Associated Press. “I think that we’ve seen in the last two weeks how effective we can be in mobilizing students, staff, faculty, and the administration to prevent sexual assault and penalize it more severely.” RELATED: Key elements of Rolling Stone’s U-Va. gang rape allegations in doubt The epic Rolling Stone gang-rape fallout — and how major publications get it wrong Justin Moyer is the deputy editor of the Morning Mix. |
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| abb | Dec 8 2014, 05:56 AM Post #174 |
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2014/12/07/after-apology-rolling-stone-changes-its-story-once-more/ After apology, Rolling Stone changes its story once more By Peter Holley December 7 at 1:50 PM Rolling Stone has amended a statement published Friday about its widely criticized story detailing an alleged gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity. The initial three-paragraph statement was published after doubts about the accuser’s story continued to emerge, setting off days of fierce criticism directed toward the magazine and the story’s author, Sabrina Rubin Erdely. In its initial statement, Rolling Stone appeared to place blame for the story’s unraveling on the unidentified accuser, a student referred to as “Jackie.” Some activists saw that stance as throwing blame on the woman who told the story of her assault. The statement, signed by managing editor Will Dana, said that “there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie’s account,” before adding, “We have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced.” A day later, without mentioning that the statement had been updated, the magazine appeared to pivot, noting that the “mistakes are on Rolling Stone, not on Jackie.” The updated statement notes that there appear to be “discrepancies” in Jackie’s account. It acknowledges reporting from The Washington Post and other outlets that called details of Rolling Stone’s reporting into question. “We published the article with the firm belief that it was accurate,” Dana said in the updated statement. “Given all of these reports, however, we have come to the conclusion that we were mistaken in honoring Jackie’s request to not contact the alleged assaulters to get their account. In trying to be sensitive to the unfair shame and humiliation many women feel after a sexual assault, we made a judgment – the kind of judgment reporters and editors make every day. We should have not made this agreement with Jackie and we should have worked harder to convince her that the truth would have been better served by getting the other side of the story. These mistakes are on Rolling Stone, not on Jackie. We apologize to anyone who was affected by the story and we will continue to investigate the events of that evening.” For some observers like Jaclyn Friedman, who co-edited a book on rape culture titled “Yes Means Yes,” the amended statement was too little too late. “This statement is okay but the horse is out of the barn, damage to Jackie has already been done,” Friedman told The Post. “People are calling her a liar and calling this a hoax based on the fact that Rolling Stone said their faith in her had been misplaced.” Jessica Contrera and Sarah Kaplan contributed to this post, which has been updated. RELATED: Updated apology digs bigger hole for Rolling Stone How Rolling Stone failed in its story of alleged rape at the University of Virginia U-Va. remains resolved to address sexual violence as Rolling Stone account unravels Rolling Stone’s disastrous U-Va. story: A case of real media bias Rolling Stone needs to come clean about its campus rape story Peter Holley is a general assignment reporter at The Washington Post. He can be reached at peter.holley@washpost.com. |
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| abb | Dec 8 2014, 05:58 AM Post #175 |
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http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/shawnmitchell/2014/12/08/rolling-stone-recants-but-pbs-cant-let-go-n1928738 December 8, 2014 Rolling Stone Recants, but PBS Can’t Let Go Shawn Mitchell 12/8/2014 12:01:00 AM PBS’s News Hour accomplished the near impossible last Friday. In the matter of Rolling Stone’s discredited article about a gang rape at the University of Virginia, the News Hour covered itself in even more discredit than did the disgraced magazine. As holes appeared in the reporting, and the account of “Jackie’s” night of horror and violation in a frat house fell apart, Rolling Stone retreated. Managing Editor Will Dana issued a statement disavowing the story. “"In the face of new information, there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie's account, and we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced." Rolling Stone apologized to the people “affected by the story.” The statement included the startling information that Rolling Stone had promised Jackie not to contact any of the accused rapists because she claimed she feared retribution. That raises the ethical question of reporting conclusions that represent only “she said.” It also raises the logical question of how a story that more or less identifies the accused, and results in repercussions against fraternities, could avoid triggering the retaliation Jackie feared. Dana admitted Rolling Stone should not have made the promise. This is dramatic stuff. A storied publication reports a hideous sexual assault, prolonged ordeal, and a callous response by the University and students alike. The story gains global attention and sets punitive wheels in motion at UVa. Then under scrutiny, the story implodes and is disavowed. That’s certainly worthy of scrutiny on the News Hour, which had been one of the outlets breathlessly covering the scandal. It shouldn’t take a journalism professor, however, to see that upon Rolling Stone’s walkback, the real story became about the practice of journalism and the standards for investigating and reporting explosive accusations. It’s important to know how such serious falsehoods made it through the process and smeared a campus and a community. That would be an important and interesting segment. But, that’s not the story the News Hour’s Judy Woodruff aired. Instead, viewers received an incoherent mash of inconsistent messages. Woodruff didn’t even lead with the magazine’s stark and unambiguous statement. Instead, she opened with a recounting of the “horrific” allegations and the global response to the story. Then she acknowledged the magazine had issued a note to its readers saying new questions had been raised. She minimized its expression the story was wrong. Woodruff asked Washington Post reporter T. Rees. Shapiro about the "new questions that have been raised." The surreal dialogue felt as if Woodruff were clinging to the spirit of the account, but as a matter of due diligence, was open to considering new questions. Rolling Stone had already abandoned its own article! But, the News Hour was double checking dates and times either to bolster the account, or at least satisfy itself rehabilitation was hopeless. Woodruff and Rees repeatedly referenced the “horrific story” and solemnly addressed what they seem to see as the higher meaning. They assured viewers that other cases of alleged sexual assault were still being investigated. The university wasn’t abandoning the “soul searching” and commitment to respond more effectively that had been occasioned by the story’s publication. It would follow through on it chastened resolve to respond more effectively to the important issue of sexual assault on campus. Woodruff and Rees fretted that the unraveling of this case might deter other victims of sexual assault from coming forward to press their allegations. “What are the lessons, here?” Woodruff queried Rees. It didn’t seem to occur to her the lessons might be about journalism, not a college rape culture. Throughout, her consternation and disappointment were palpable that the awful story wasn’t true; a college freshman didn't actually get gang raped in a frat house on top of broken shards of glass for three hours. A legendary magazine lit a fire of scandal and sensation and the national media including the News Hour got burned. Woodruff, however, did not see this as an opportunity for journalists to reflect. She kept the focus on issues of sexual assault on campus and how the system responds. PBS decided it would rather re-warm and savor its own left over spew than flat admit that it and the rest of the media got the story wrong, and consider the implications of that. It was a missed opportunity and a bizarre performance. |
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| abb | Dec 8 2014, 06:00 AM Post #176 |
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http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/rolling-stone-uva-reporting-rape December 7, 2014 Reporting on Rape By Margaret Talbot Last month, Rolling Stone ran an article about an alleged gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity house, based on interviews with a student identified only as “Jackie.” It now appears that key details of the story, reported by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, may not be true. Other journalists—notably, my friend Hanna Rosin and Allison Benedikt, at Slate, and Paul Farhi, Erik Wemple, and T. Rees Shapiro, at The Washington Post—raised doubts about the reporting late last month, but Rolling Stone dismissed them. Then, on Friday, the magazine issued a statement saying, “In the face of new information reported by the Washington Post and other news outlets, there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie’s account.” (An earlier version of the statement had emphasized the magazine’s trust in Jackie, and regretted that it had been “misplaced”—wording that seemed to settle too much responsibility for the story’s shortcomings on Jackie and not enough on the reporter or her editors.) Rolling Stone’s statement did not enumerate the discrepancies, but the Post did. According to Erdely’s story, Jackie was asked on a date, in September, 2012, by “Drew,” a lifeguard she worked with at the campus aquatic center. Drew brought her back to the Phi Kappa Psi house and invited her to an upstairs bedroom. There, she was shoved to the floor, fell through a glass table, and, while lying on shards of glass, was raped by seven men. Drew egged them on in what, horribly, seemed to be some sort of hazing ritual for new pledges. When Jackie stumbled out of the fraternity hours later, dazed and bleeding, and found her friends, they convinced her not to report what had happened to the police or campus authorities, because they were worried that it would jeopardize her social standing and theirs. When the Post contacted the friends last week, they said the account of the attack she gave them that night differed from the version in Rolling Stone. Jackie had not appeared to be physically injured, when they saw her late that night, they said, and she told them she’d been at a fraternity party where she had been forced to have oral sex with multiple men. They offered to get her help, but she declined. While she may have given Erdely a fuller and more accurate description of the events—perhaps she was too shaken that night to tell the friends more—the discrepancies seem to be troubling her friends. The Post also tracked down the man called “Drew” in the article, whom Jackie identified for the first time this week, and he said he had never met Jackie or taken her on a date. He could be lying, of course, but at the least, his account raises questions about Rolling Stone’s. He also was not a member of Phi Kappa Psi. The fraternity chapter issued a statement last week that said it would continue to coöperate with a police investigation into the charges, but had found no evidence for them. “Moreover, no ritualized sexual assault is part of our pledging or initiating process. This notion is vile, and we vehemently refute this claim.” One of Jackie’s friends, “Andy,” whom the Rolling Stone article described as having advised her not to report what happened to her, told the Post he never spoke to a reporter from the magazine. (The original article leaves ambiguous whether Erdely confirmed this part of the story with anyone other than Jackie.) Andy said, “The perception that I’m gravitating toward is that something happened that night and it’s gotten lost in different iterations of the stories that have been told. Is there a possibility nothing happened? Sure. I think the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle.” There are people who will argue that if Jackie was assaulted at a fraternity that night, it doesn’t matter if the specific details are wrong, or uncertain. Erdely herself seemed to be gravitating toward that point when she said, on Slate’s DoubleX podcast, “Given the degree of her trauma, there’s no doubt in my mind that something happened to her that night. What exactly happened—I don’t know. I wasn’t in that room. I don’t know.” As Rosin and Benedikt point out, that’s the nature of reporting: the reporter is almost never in the room. But the specific details of an accusation do matter. Erdely must have chosen this case, among all the other campus sexual assaults she could have reported, precisely because its details were so horrible that she knew it would get our attention. Neither “Drew,” the central figure the Post tracked down, nor any of the other men at the fraternity party appear in the article outside of Jackie’s recollections of them. We don’t read about them denying the charge, or unwillingly lending support to it, or complicating or corroborating or casting doubt on Jackie’s account in any of the ways they might have. That makes for a remarkably weak piece of journalism, and an enormously frustrating situation. If this story does turn out to be largely false, it will do real damage to the important new movement to crack down on sexual assault on college campuses. “One of my biggest fears with these inconsistencies emerging is that people will be unwilling to believe survivors in the future,” Alex Pinkleton, a friend of Jackie’s who survived a rape and a rape attempt at U.V.A., said to the Post. “However, we need to remember that the majority of survivors who are coming forward are telling the truth.” She went on, saying, “While the details of this one case may have been misreported, this does not erase the somber truth this article brought to light: rape is far more prevalent than we realize, and it is often misunderstood and mishandled by peers, institutions, and society at large.” She’s exactly right. When Hanna Rosin interviewed her on Slate’s DoubleX podcast, she asked Erdely several times about whether she attempted to contact the accused men, and this is what Erdely told her: I reached out to them in multiple ways. They were kind of hard to get in touch with because [the fraternity’s] contact page was pretty outdated. But I wound up speaking … I wound up getting in touch with their local president, who sent me an e-mail, and then I talked with their sort of, their national guy, who’s kind of their national crisis manager. They were both helpful in their own way, I guess. That isn’t exactly journalistic due diligence in a case where such extreme allegations are being made. As a journalist, it’s hard to talk to sources who may contradict a vulnerable person with whom you empathize, and in whom you have invested your trust. I hate that part of reporting, and would skip it if I could—but you can’t. It appears, however, that Erdely and her editors did not think it was necessary to contact the men Jackie was accusing. Jackie did not want to name them, and Erdely probably assumed that if she did track them down, she would lose Jackie as a source, and, with her, the whole story. Erdely probably also shared the point of view of the many victims’ advocates who argue that when people say they have been raped, they, above all others, should be believed. That’s a position that makes moral and emotional sense for advocates and friends of the victim, whose primary role is to comfort and support. But it’s not a position that makes sense for journalists, whose job is to find out what actually happened. The point of talking to the men Jackie accused would not only be to elicit a pro forma response, however hollow it seemed, or to guard against false accusations, however rare they may be; getting impressions of the men would also create an account of what happened that was as revealing and insightful as possible. If the assault did happen as Jackie described it, who were these apparent monsters? Where did they come from? How did they think and talk about women? Earlier in the week, some journalists spoke in support of Rolling Stone’s decision to leave the men out of the story. Helen Benedict, a professor at the Columbia Journalism School, told the Times, “If a reporter were doing a story about a university accused of failing to address the mugging or robbery of a student, that reporter would not be expected to interview the alleged mugger or robber.” She continued, “The piece might have been stronger with more than one source, but exposés of wrongdoing often start with one whistle-blower.” But the crime Erdely described was much more unusual and terrible than a mugging. And, even in the case of a mugging, a responsible reporter would not have proceeded without corroboration from someone other than the victim. It wouldn’t have to be a comment from the alleged mugger. It could be a police report, for example, or the account of an eyewitness. One of the article’s strongest points was that, partly out of a desire to show sensitivity to Jackie, the campus administrators who heard about her claims chose not to investigate them. Rather than force her to confront the alleged perpetrators, they allowed her to choose whether to press charges, request a campus hearing, or just go on with her life. Yet by not seeking the men out, Erdely and Rolling Stone made the same mistake. By arguably violating journalistic ethics to respect Jackie’s wishes and her fears of the accused, they let the allegedly evil bros remain as hidden and unaccountable as they would want to be. More than a decade ago, I wrote about the McMartin preschool case, and other satanic ritual child abuse accusations that turned out to be false. Back then, the slogan many supporters of the accusations brandished was, “Believe the Children.” It was an antidote to skepticism about real claims of child abuse, just as today, “Believe the Victims” is a reaction to a long history of callous oversight of rape accusations. “Believe the Victims” makes sense as a starting presumption, but a presumption of belief should never preclude questions. It’s not wrong or disrespectful for reporters to ask for corroboration, or for editors to insist on it. Truth-seeking won’t undermine efforts to prevent campus sexual assault and protect its victims; it should make them stronger and more effective. Margaret Talbot is a staff writer and the author of “The Entertainer.” |
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| abb | Dec 8 2014, 06:03 AM Post #177 |
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2014/12/07/updated-apology-digs-bigger-hole-for-rolling-stone/ Updated apology digs bigger hole for Rolling Stone By Erik Wemple December 7 at 3:52 PM Rolling Stone story on U-Va. Rolling Stone magazine has updated the “note to readers” that it posted Friday in light of a Washington Post report casting doubts on its article “A Rape on Campus” by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, which told the horrific story of a University of Virginia freshman named Jackie suffering a seven-man gang rape in 2012 at the prestigious Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house. “We apologize to anyone who was affected by the story and we will continue to investigate the events of that evening,” reads the last line of the note. The new version makes one significant deletion. Gone is this line: “In the face of new information, there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie’s account, and we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced.” That sentiment aligned with an ugly history of blaming rape victims for their trauma and for shaming them when their stories occasionally don’t pan out. Now, the key line reads, “These mistakes are on Rolling Stone, not on Jackie.” That’s not only more sensitive, but more accurate as well. The change in tone appears consistent with a tweet issued by Rolling Stone Managing Editor Will Dana on Friday: Now that Rolling Stone is coming around to accepting blame, the question has become how much of it must come its way. A lot, as it turns out. To recap the holes identified by The Post on Friday: • Some of Jackie’s close friends have come to doubt her account, whereas Erdely said after the story was published that the friends’ accounts were “consistent” with her story. Some of those doubts were seeded before Rolling Stone descended on the University of Virginia. For instance, Jackie initially told then-U-Va. senior Emily Renda that she was attacked by five men, later changing the number to seven. “I don’t even know what I believe at this point,” Renda told The Post. Rolling Stone told the Erik Wemple Blog that Erdely had interviewed “dozens” of Jackie’s friends. • Whereas Rolling Stone reported that Jackie had emerged bloodied and battered from the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house amid a party on Sept. 28, 2012, The Post reported conflicting accounts from friends that arrived to help her. One of them told the paper that Jackie “did not appear physically injured at the time but was visibly shaken and told him and two other friends that she had been at a fraternity party and had been forced to have oral sex with a group of men” — a different scenario, though still horrible, from the gang rape alleged in Rolling Stone. • Phi Kappa Psi says it didn’t hold “a date function or social event” on the night in question. • Rolling Stone reported that Jackie had met “Drew,” the Phi Kappa Psi brother who led her into the gang rape, as they worked as lifeguards at the university pool. The fraternity claims that no member worked at the pool in 2012. • One of the attackers identified by Jackie to friends “was actually the name of a student who belongs to a different fraternity, and no one by that name has been a member of Phi Kappa Psi.” That man told The Post that “he never met Jackie in person and never took her out on a date. He also said he was not a member of Phi Kappa Psi.” The central confession of the Rolling Stone “note to readers” reflects heinous wrongdoing. At the request of Jackie, the magazine refrained from contacting the accused in this incident. “Because of the sensitive nature of Jackie’s story,” reads the note, “we decided to honor her request not to contact the man who she claimed orchestrated the attack on her nor any of the men who she claimed participated in the attack for fear of retaliation against her.” The idea that the magazine was honoring a victim’s request conflicts with what a Rolling Stone editor told The Post’s Paul Farhi: “We did not talk to them. We could not reach them,” said Sean Woods of Rolling Stone. So did the magazine lie about its reporting efforts? Have some sympathy here: What would you do if forced to choose between admitting that you agreed with a source not to contact other sources and admitting that your publication lacked the sophistication to track down modern day college students with presumably large digital footprints? In any case, Rolling Stone now acknowledges that not checking with the other side was a mistake, though the abandonment of common sense and journalism merely starts with this critical omission. As the story explains, Jackie has declined to file a complaint about the incident, a documentary problem that places ever more emphasis on multilateral sourcing: The accused assailants, friends, witnesses — anyone who could support or knock down the account. Right smack in the middle of the Rolling Story are three people who could help. Here, we’ll paste in the excerpt from “A Rape on Campus” that introduces them: Disoriented, Jackie burst out a side door, realized she was lost, and dialed a friend, screaming, “Something bad happened. I need you to come and find me!” Minutes later, her three best friends on campus – two boys and a girl (whose names are changed) – arrived to find Jackie on a nearby street corner, shaking. “What did they do to you? What did they make you do?” Jackie recalls her friend Randall demanding. Jackie shook her head and began to cry. The group looked at one another in a panic. They all knew about Jackie’s date; the Phi Kappa Psi house loomed behind them. “We have to get her to the hospital,” Randall said. Their other two friends, however, weren’t convinced. “Is that such a good idea?” she recalls Cindy asking. “Her reputation will be shot for the next four years.” Andy seconded the opinion, adding that since he and Randall both planned to rush fraternities, they ought to think this through. The three friends launched into a heated discussion about the social price of reporting Jackie’s rape, while Jackie stood beside them, mute in her bloody dress, wishing only to go back to her dorm room and fall into a deep, forgetful sleep. Detached, Jackie listened as Cindy prevailed over the group: “She’s gonna be the girl who cried ‘rape,’ and we’ll never be allowed into any frat party again.” Did Rolling Stone ever interview those people or other key folks? Read the lines above, and you’ll hear their voices — filtered through Jackie. “Randall,” notes Erdely in the story, turned down an interview request on account of his “loyalty to his own frat” — yet another little detail in “A Rape on Campus” that stinks of implausibility. On the topic of the reachability of these friends, Rolling Stone commits perhaps the most self-damaging parenthetical in the history of journalistic self-assessment. It comes from the magazine’s “note to readers”: “A friend of Jackie’s (who we were told would not speak to Rolling Stone) told the Washington Post that he found Jackie that night a mile from the school’s fraternities.” Bold text added to highlight an un-get-pastable problem: Rolling Stone is in possession of a gang-rape allegation that includes a broken glass table, seven assailants and penetration with a bottle. Not only does it not have an official complaint, it has agreed not to contact the accused AND it has apparently accepted the affirmation of some interested party that a pivotal source isn’t really up for an interview. Where is that an acceptable excuse? The Erik Wemple Blog has asked Rolling Stone whether the parenthetical means that the magazine didn’t even try to find this person and whether it’s standard practice to let others speak for a source’s willingness to cooperate. (It’s possible that it refers only to Rolling Stone’s efforts to reach this person after “A Rape on Campus” was published). Also: Who was it that told the magazine that the friend wouldn’t talk? Rolling Stone spokeswoman Melissa Bruno responds, “We decline to comment further at this time.” In a follow-up to its Friday piece, The Post has some insight on Rolling Stone’s approach to these friends. Or lack thereof. The person identified in the Rolling Stone story as “Cindy” told the newspaper that Erdely’s version of events was “completely false.” That’s less condemnatory of Rolling Stone than “Cindy’s” contention that the magazine neither contacted nor interviewed her. Furthermore, “Andy” told The Post that he “never spoke to a Rolling Stone reporter,” as reported on Friday. Thus far, assessments of the damage done by Erdely’s piece have focused on how it distracts from the cause of stomping out sexual assault at the University of Virginia and on other campuses. And indeed it does. But this widely distributed magazine also managed to slander an entire group of people via its depiction of “Cindy,” “Andy” and “Randall.” The way Erdely tells it, the trio arrives to assist Jackie within minutes of her calling in the wee hours of the morning, yet once they get there, they’re somehow consumed with superficialities. The blast from Erdely is so searing as to merit repetition: The three friends launched into a heated discussion about the social price of reporting Jackie’s rape, while Jackie stood beside them, mute in her bloody dress, wishing only to go back to her dorm room and fall into a deep, forgetful sleep. Detached, Jackie listened as Cindy prevailed over the group: “She’s gonna be the girl who cried ‘rape,’ and we’ll never be allowed into any frat party again.” “Cindy” told The Post that “there was never any discussion among Jackie and the group involving how their reputations or social status might be affected by seeking help.” Rolling Stone offered its apology to “anyone who was affected by the story,” and that means every student, alumna and alumnus. Again: Fire the Rolling Stone editors who worked on this story. A final note: The Rolling Stone note pledges that it will “continue to investigate the events of that evening.” Sorry, but the time to do that was before publishing. Erik Wemple writes the Erik Wemple blog, where he reports and opines on media organizations of all sorts. |
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| abb | Dec 8 2014, 06:05 AM Post #178 |
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http://gotnews.com/breaking-heres-jackie-coakley-rape-obsessed-pinterest-account-uvahoax/ BREAKING: Here’s Jackie Coakley “Rape Obsessed” Pinterest Account #UVAHoax December 8, 2014 by Charles C. Johnson 56 Comments Gotnews.com has obtained the rape obsessed Pinterest account of the 20-year-old girl at the center of the University of Virginia rape hoax. We can also confirm that Jackie Coakley has misled other students at both her high school and her college about her past sexual relations with men. Coakley’s social media postings (below) reveal a woman obsessed with rape and well aware of the political consequences of rape allegations. These reports confirm other reports in Talking Points Memo that Coakley made up key details of her alleged encounter at a University of Virginia fraternity. TPM had more details about Coakley lying on the night of her assault. In an interview with the Washington Post on Friday night, Jackie’s friend “Andy” said that Jackie told him she was assaulted the night of the alleged incident. He said that he and two of her friends did meet Jackie near the the fraternity houses. But he said that her dress was not covered in blood and that they never discussed “the social price of reporting Jackie’s rape.” GotNews.com has also received word from two University of Virginia students that Coakley has lied about sexual assaults in the past. We will publish more about this past in the coming days. GotNews.com will also be offering a financial reward for credible evidence of other Coakley embellishments. It is a crime under Virginia law to falsely accuse some of rape. § 18.2-209. False publications. Any person who knowingly and willfully states, delivers or transmits by any means whatever to any publisher, or employee of a publisher, of any newspaper, magazine, or other publication or to any owner, or employee of an owner, of any radio station, television station, news service or cable service, any false and untrue statement, knowing the same to be false or untrue, concerning any person or corporation, with intent that the same shall be published, broadcast or otherwise disseminated, shall be guilty of a Class 3 misdemeanor. Code 1950, § 18.1-407; 1960, c. 358; 1975, cc. 14, 15; 1978, c. 359. GotNews.com is committed to revealing the truth about what really happened. If you have any questions, please email me at editor@gotnews.com. |
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| Joan Foster | Dec 8 2014, 06:28 AM Post #179 |
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Article in Slate this AM!!!! This Rolling Stone debacle might just light the fire that gets Joshua Strange et al. the attention they need to push back on these witch hunts. http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2014/12/college_rape_campus_sexual_assault_is_a_serious_problem_but_the_efforts.html |
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| abb | Dec 8 2014, 07:19 AM Post #180 |
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http://thefederalist.com/2014/12/08/everybody-loses-in-the-uva-rape-story/ The Federalist Everybody Loses in the UVA Rape Story The UVA rape story is a disaster for everyone, brought to you by "narrative journalism" which doesn't like the facts to get in the way of a good story. By Robert Tracinski December 8, 2014 I had been mildly skeptical of the Rolling Stone story about a flamboyantly evil gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity. It seemed more than a little too good to be true. You could not have invented a story that would better validate every single feminist claim about the supposed “rape epidemic” on college campuses and the “rape culture” that supposedly supports it. It didn’t hurt that the story also played perfectly into elite intellectuals’ natural prejudice against frat boys. So I withheld judgment until the story faced a little scrutiny and could be verified by more than just one report in one magazine. It turns out that it couldn’t be, and the whole story is falling apart. The Federalist‘s Mollie Hemingway sums up the breaking developments, in which Rolling Stone has basically retracted the story. The accused fraternity has also issued a statement in which they refute several key factual claims from the article. This is an ugly story in which everybody loses—well, almost everybody, but we’ll get to that at the end. Let’s start by looking at who has been damaged by this story. 1) Actual victims of rape. The point of stories like the Rolling Stone report is supposed to be to prevent rapists from attacking more victims, right? And the best way to do that is to make it easier for victims of rape to come forward and report the crime, so that justice can be done and rapists can be sent to jail. But a very prominent false allegation of rape is likely to have the opposite effect, discouraging the reporting of rape because the victim fears she won’t be believed. 2) Advocates for rape victims. They put their credibility on the line, particularly at the University of Virginia, to back up the accuser in this case, so far only identified by the pseudonym “Jackie.” In fact, “Jackie” got her start by telling her story to local rape victim advocate groups at the University, who then brought her to the attention of Rolling Stone reporter Sabrina Erdely. They just got burned. Now they will have to institute some kind of safeguards to make sure that they aren’t spreading false accusations that could discredit them. Then again, maybe they should have been doing that all along. 3) “Jackie” I’m assuming that “Jackie” will eventually be identified, whether she likes it or not. At this point, anything we say about her is pure speculation. Maybe a frat boy took advantage of her, and she decided to extravagantly embellish the story to get revenge. Maybe she found herself failing at school and invented a story of trauma to excuse it. (The Rolling Stone story says she didn’t reveal her rape until an administrator asked her why she was failing her classes.) Maybe she is mentally unhinged and can’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality. Maybe she was simply seeking attention. Never underestimate the appeal of being a fake victim, which confers all the attention, sympathy, and moral authority without any of the actual trauma. (Hence all of those fake Holocaust memoirs.) Whatever kind of help “Jackie” needs, she isn’t going to get it any time soon. Instead, Rolling Stone threw her under the bus and tried to put all the blame on her for making the unverified claims they chose to report. Their defense, when this inevitably ends up in court, will be to blame their source for deceiving them. As @Popehat puts it, “I don’t know what happened to Jackie at UVA. But I do know what Rolling Stone’s lawyers will do to her when [a law]suit’s filed. That’s sad, too.” 4) Rolling Stone A magazine that was somewhat desperately trying to regain relevance in national politics has instead destroyed its credibility and probably eviscerated its staff. They broke the most basic rules of journalism. As the old saying goes: if your mother says she loves you, get a second source. But if someone makes a spectacular claim about gang rape used as a fraternity initiation at a respected university? Nah, one source will do. No need to interview anybody else. Everyone involved with this story, up the whole chain of command, needs to be fired and replaced. I hear most of the staff of The New Republic is suddenly available, though I doubt they’ll be eager to leave one sinking ship for another. 5) Sabrina Rubin Erdely Where did this reporter learn the rules of journalism? That might actually be a legitimate question. It turns out she was a classmate of serial fabulist Stephen Glass. What were they teaching in that class? So now, like Glass, she gets to never work again in respectable journalism. 6) The media in general. The mainstream media spent a week uncritically repeating the Rolling Stone story, and many spent another week defending it and discouraging any questions about the story “Jackie” told. As the story has fallen apart, some are still refusing to retract their support for it. My favorite response is from Sally Kohn, who took to task two other mainstream commentators for issuing apologies: “Really @MarinCogin @jbouie? So we have to independently fact check every story before we believe/share it?” Well, no, you don’t. But somebody does. That’s one of the cornerstones of journalism: looking for additional sources and independent confirmation of facts. At the very least, you have to exercise reasonable skepticism about extraordinary claims, and if you’re wrong, you have to take responsibility for it. This kind of reaction highlights how the Rolling Stone story got published in the first place. If Erdely and her editors broke the rules of journalism, they were encouraged to think they could get away with it because they were confirming popular prejudices among their peers. They thought they could get away with being “fake but accurate.” And so the mainstream media let Rolling Stone drag down everybody’s credibility. 7) Radical feminists. Radical feminists created the theory that made this fraud possible. They were the ones who pushed the importance of “believing in women”—which is to say that women never lie about rape and must be automatically believed, and that it is inherently sexist to ask questions or require evidence. In effect, they are philosophically opposed to fact-checking a report like this one. As the fact-checking comes in, Jessica Valenti’s response is to declare, “I trust women,” and then go on to blame Rolling Stone for “throwing this young woman under the bus.” Amanda Marcotte blames the collapse of the story on “rape apologists” who “think that if they can ‘discredit’ one rape story, that means no other rape stories can be true, either”—a position held, so far as anyone can tell, by no one. But feminist blogger Melissa McEwan gets the top prize for this M.C. Escher drawing of a thought: “I can’t state this more emphatically: If Jackie’s story is partially or wholly untrue, it doesn’t validate the reasons for disbelieving her.” A few feminists have issued a prompt and unreserved apology. The rest are going down with this ship. 8) Lena Dunham. Guess who else may have fabricated a story about campus rape? In her memoir, media darling Lena Dunham describes how, at Oberlin College, she and several other women were sexually assaulted by a prominent campus conservative named “Barry.” So Breitbart launched a search for “Barry the Republican” and pronounced him a “ghost.” None of the details in Dunham’s memoir corresponded to anything anyone recalls. This was at a relatively small school with relatively few conservatives, not many years ago. But it turns out that there is one “Barry” who has been fingered by Dunham’s fans as her attacker, despite not fitting key parts of her description. He now lives under the shadow of an accusation that Dunham has not quite made nor retracted. The key line from this story is a college administrator’s explanation for why she wouldn’t cooperate with John Nolte’s investigation: “Asking whether or not a victim is telling the truth is irrelevant. It’s just not important if they are telling the truth.” Well, that explains a lot. Dunham has already been criticized for her public obsession with her own exaggerated neuroses. Now she may be revealed as someone who sought attention by defaming an innocent man and devaluing the stories of actual rape victims. 9) UVA President Teresa Sullivan. When a single author in a single magazine made an inflammatory charge, how should the University of Virginia’s president, Teresa Sullivan, have responded? She might have responded by declaring how seriously she regarded the accusation but refusing to take drastic action until its truth could be actually be confirmed. She could have responded with calm, caution, and mature leadership. Instead, she pretty much panicked, immediately shutting down all activities at all fraternities and sororities. In light of Rolling Stone‘s retraction, she is neither changing course nor offering any kind of apology. In a new statement, she declares: “Over the past two weeks, our community has been more focused than ever on one of the most difficult and critical issues facing higher education today: sexual violence on college campuses. Today’s news must not alter this focus.” In other words: the facts will not alter her course of action. Sullivan doesn’t seem to realize that it is also her responsibility to protect the young men at her university. And that leads us to the last big loser. 10) The men who were accused in this case. Sure, the young men of Phi Kappa Psi might have their names cleared. But we all know how this works. They will be forever known as men “accused of rape.” There will always be those who heard the accusations but never heard the retraction—and as we’ve seen above, there will be those die-hard ideological fanatics who persist in believing the accusations even after they are no longer credible. It’s better to be vindicated than not. But imagine if that was one of your sons who was publicly branded as a brutal felon and sexual predator. These young men have suffered from a public defamation that will follow them around for a long time. So this is a big disaster for everyone, brought to you by the “narrative journalism” of the mainstream media, which doesn’t like the facts to get in the way of a good story. Yet there is one overlooked winner from this case. And it’s interesting that no one has talked about this yet. 1) Men falsely accused of rape. For some time, feminists have been trying to promote the dogma that women never lie about rape and that the first responsibility of those who respond to an alleged sexual assault is to believe the story the woman tells. Yet this implies that men accused of rape are to be considered guilty until proven innocent. Or that they should just be considered guilty, period. That notion was never very plausible in the first place. Needless to say, it has been shattered by the collapse of the Rolling Stone story. There is a very good reason to be careful when examining an accusation of rape. False accusations are relatively rare, and for a real victim, an overly rough and adversarial cross-examination can seem like a whole new form of trauma. So investigating rape is a delicate business. But regard for the feelings of genuine victims does not eliminate the rights of the accused or the need for due process. It doesn’t justify destroying the lives of innocent men or sacrificing the sanctity of individual facts in the name of a questionable “wider truth.” That lesson is the only good thing to be salvaged from this journalistic disaster. Follow Robert on Twitter. |
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9:16 AM Jul 11