| UVA Rape Story Collapses; Duke Lacrosse Redux | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Dec 5 2014, 01:45 PM (60,442 Views) | |
| MikeKell | Apr 6 2015, 12:31 AM Post #916 |
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Still a Newbie
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From jewel cove:
right you are. She only apologized to readers, her colleagues, and victims of sexual assault. She did not apologize to victims of reputational assault, nor admit that she was a repeat reputational predator/offender. Shouldn't she have to register as a reputational offender? Edited by MikeKell, Apr 6 2015, 12:33 AM.
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| MikeKell | Apr 6 2015, 01:11 AM Post #917 |
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Still a Newbie
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Someone (Erdely if the NYT printed her statement exactly, the NYT if they changed it….) doesn't know that the "A" in UVA is not a separate word that is abbreviated: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/06/business/media/statement-from-writer-of-rolling-stone-rape-article-sabrina-erdely.html "I want to offer my deepest apologies: to Rolling Stone’s readers, to my Rolling Stone editors and colleagues, to the U.V.A. community, and to any victims of sexual assault who may feel fearful as a result of my article." No one can accuse her of missing her period. Edited by MikeKell, Apr 6 2015, 01:12 AM.
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| abb | Apr 6 2015, 03:59 AM Post #918 |
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http://reason.com/blog/2015/04/05/columbias-uva-rape-report-jackie-lied-en?utm_campaign=naytev&utm_content=5521e4d7e4b0f69bd5bc7226 Columbia's UVA Rape Report: Jackie Lied. End of Story? No one was fired from Rolling Stone. Not even Erdely. Robby Soave|Apr. 5, 2015 9:35 pm Sabrina Rubin Erdely and the editors of Rolling Stone accepted the claims of a single source as gospel truth—even when every brain cell they possessed should have told them otherwise, according to a fascinating report from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism that details the magazine’s failings with respect to its now debunked story from last November, “A Rape on Campus.” The report was released Sunday night. At 12,000 words, it’s actually longer than the story it concerns. While it makes for a fascinating reading, nothing contained within will be surprising or earth-shattering for readers already familiar with the debacle. Given all the (entirely fair) criticism Erdely has taken for failing to vet the story, I was most struck by the undeniable fact that the author actually did press Jackie for key details about the identities of the perpetrators. In this sense, she possessed at least some of the right impulses. She believed Jackie, but she knew she needed names in order to corroborate. The problems came when Jackie simply refused or dodged these key questions. Despite misgivings, Erdely—and, to be fair, her editors—charged blindly ahead. From the report: Jackie proved to be a challenging source. At times, she did not respond to Erdely's calls, texts and emails. At two points, the reporter feared Jackie might withdraw her cooperation. Also, Jackie refused to provide Erdely the name of the lifeguard who had organized the attack on her. She said she was still afraid of him. That led to tense exchanges between Erdely and Jackie, but the confrontation ended when Rolling Stone's editors decided to go ahead without knowing the lifeguard's name or verifying his existence. After that concession, Jackie cooperated fully until publication. It’s actually even worse than that. When Erdely told Jackie that she really did need to know the name of Jackie’s date (the lifeguard who supposedly masterminded the attack), Jackie stopped answering her phone calls and texts for about two weeks. Eventually, Erdely left Jackie another voicemail in which the writer agreed to stop trying to contact the lifeguard and instead use a pseudonym, Drew. After that, Jackie magically reappeared, calling Erdely back “quickly,” according to the report. Jackie, in fact, displayed impressive levels of self-preservation and rational behavior—at least, from the perspective of a highly disturbed person whose goal was to spread an incredible lie without exposing it as such. She was highly detailed in her account of the crime, gave descriptions, and recalled (wholly invented) conversations with great accuracy. And she studiously avoided any line of questioning that would have exposed the lie. If a particular question posed a threat, she either invented a reason why it couldn’t be answered, or simply stopped responding. Some of these inventions were rather colorful—and make it impossible to write her off as merely misremembering her trauma. She told Erdely that her friend Ryan—one of the infamous three friends who had met with her after the rape—would not talk to the reporter about that night. According to the report: On Sept. 11, Erdely traveled to Charlottesville and met Jackie in person for the first time, at a restaurant near the UVA campus. With her digital recorder running, the reporter again asked about speaking to Ryan. "I did talk to Ryan," Jackie disclosed. She said she had bumped into him and had asked if he would be interested in talking to Rolling Stone. Jackie went on to quote Ryan's incredulous reaction: "No! … I'm in a fraternity here, Jackie, I don't want the Greek system to go down, and it seems like that's what you want to happen. … I don't want to be a part of whatever little shit show you're running." "Ryan is obviously out," Erdely told Jackie a little later. That conversation was completely invented by Jackie; she never spoke to Ryan about Erdely’s story. And yet Erdely’s editor, Sean Woods, decided to put the “shit show” quote in the final article, even though neither of them tried to reach Ryan to confirm that he had indeed said this. If either had contacted Ryan, he would have told them that the quote was a lie—likely unmasking Jackie as a liar with that one basic act of journalistic integrity. (The article’s mention of two other rapes at Phi Kappa Psi were also exposed as mere conjecture from a single, highly unreliable source… you guessed it: Jackie.) Despite these mistakes, no one at Rolling Stone thinks their fact-checking process is systematically broken: they just screwed up this one time, they say. While that’s an eye-rolling assertion, I think I know what caused them to take leave of their senses. The source was a rape victim, and the writers and editors were too afraid of appearing unsympathetic to Jackie’s plight to treat her stonewalling with the skepticism it deserved. Even so, Rolling Stone has decided not to fire anyone. Erdely, a contributor, will continue to write for the publication, according to publisher Jann Wenner. That doesn’t seem like a strong enough response to an article that defamed Jackie’s friends, the fraternity, and UVA administrators—and mislead not just the campus, but the entire country, about the sexual assault crisis. The article has been fully retracted, and no longer appears on Rolling Stone's website. Richard Bradley and I were the first two journalists to write articles expressing skepticism of Erdely's reporting. You can read my initial article here. Robby Soave is a staff editor at Reason.com. |
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| abb | Apr 6 2015, 04:36 AM Post #919 |
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http://www.cavalierdaily.com/article/2015/04/rolling-stone-review-misses-mark-on-u-va-culture Rolling Stone review misses mark on U.Va. culture The Columbia Journalism report should not have confined its investigation to Jackie’s story by Managing Board | Apr 06 2015 | Yesterday, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism released its report on the journalistic catastrophe that was Rolling Stone’s “A Rape on Campus: A Brutal Assault and Struggle for Justice at UVA,” an article detailing an alleged — and subsequently discredited — account of a sexual assault at the University chapter of Phi Kappa Psi. The report is scathing. Sheila Coronel, Steve Coll and Derek Kravitz — its writers — conclude that Rolling Stone’s failure “encompassed reporting, editing, editorial supervision and fact-checking” — in other words, everything. For their part, Coronel, Coll and Kravitz appear to have thoroughly addressed the major issues with the magazine’s reporting on the allegation that is most central to the narrative presented — an allegation from Jackie, a University student. But as thoroughly as these professionals investigated the journalistic failures of Sabrina Rubin Erdely (the article’s author), Sean Woods (its editor) and Will Dana (Rolling Stone’s managing editor), they confined their investigation just to Jackie’s story. This, we feel, was a mistake. For University students, Rolling Stone did not just get one story wrong. It presented a skewed perspective of our student body; it vilified administrators without adequately explaining the constraints of federal law regarding these issues; it reduced the significance of organizations like One Less and One in Four, as well as the work of many students; it selected egregious elements of University culture — such as the “Rugby Road” song and the phrase “UVrApe” — and treated them as ubiquitous when they are not. The Columbia report does not address these issues. Toward the end of the report, in their analysis of Erdely’s take on Jackie, Coronel, Coll and Kravitz briefly delve into a discussion of confirmation bias, which they describe as “the tendency of people to be trapped by pre-existing assumptions and to select facts that support their own views while overlooking contradictory ones.” This, they say, was a factor in Erdely’s reporting, particularly as it pertained to her portrayal of the University administration, who she felt was stonewalling her. In reality, her interactions with them were complicated by many factors, including existing laws regarding universities’ ability to disclose information about sexual assaults. Confirmation bias probably did play a large role in Erdely, Woods and Dana’s editorial decisions regarding “A Rape on Campus.” But this role was not confined to their willingness to take Jackie’s story at face value. The desire to portray rape at its most gruesome, and U.Va. at its most privileged, spilled over into Erdely’s descriptions of other elements of U.Va., elements not necessarily connected to Jackie’s story. For instance, in Erdely’s narrative, she interviewed several University students without detailing their particular affiliations. Including just one quote from fourth-year student Brian Head — “The most impressive person at UVA is the person who gets straight A’s and goes to all the parties” — Erdely did not mention Head’s position at the time as president of One in Four, an all-male sexual assault prevention group that was founded at U.Va., despite the fact that this affiliation was the very reason she interviewed him in the first place. Erdely went on to mention One in Four later in the article and described it as a national organization, but conveniently left out that its founding took place at U.Va. Erdely referred to Emily Renda, a central character in the article, as a “recent grad,” but did not also describe her as a University employee, which she is and was at the time of the article’s publication. For a report that discusses at length the issue of attributing information to sources throughout articles, the lack of mention of the importance of detailing the respective roles of sources is disappointing. But this is not the only non-Jackie-related area of concern. The Columbia report also rightfully details the difficulties of sourcing throughout a narrative-style article. The authors write, “There is a tension in magazine and narrative editing between crafting a readable story — a story that flows — and providing clear attribution of quotations and facts.” This is a central issue in the presentation of Jackie’s story. It is also a central issue in the presentation of U.Va., whose student body was largely homogenized. This narrative style of journalism, in fact, requires broader scrutiny given the results of Rolling Stone’s article. Coronel, Coll and Kravitz rightfully point to the issues with fact-checking and editorial decisions in this case as beyond the confines of this particular writing style. But we should also more generally question this particular writing style as a reliable way to present news. For example, within the text of this narrative-style article, Erdely frequently inserted her perspective and opinion: when discussing U.Va.’s sexual misconduct policy, she called the adjudication of sexual assault by universities an “absurdity” and wrote that, though Title IX requires such adjudication, “no university on Earth is equipped to do [it].” This is not a balanced presentation of facts; this is an opinion being framed as objective reporting. It is not up to the authors of this report to account for every wrong Rolling Stone committed, and the job of these researchers was made harder still by the fact that they had to gather their information from Rolling Stone first (though the magazine did provide a 405 page record of everything pertaining to the article). But as we reflect on Erdely’s article, we should not confine our analysis of it just to Jackie’s story and the editorial failures surrounding its presentation. It is a dramatic oversimplification to reduce this article — which shook our University to its core — just to that one narrative. Where the Columbia report did not investigate, we hope we have filled in gaps as to Erdely’s presentation of our school. Coronel, Coll and Kravitz end their analysis as follows: “The responsibilities that universities have in preventing campus sexual assault — and the standards of performance they should be held to — are important matters of public interest. Rolling Stone was right to take them on. The pattern of its failure draws a map of how to do better.” This is entirely true, and we hope future endeavors do, in fact, do better — not just at fact-checking, but at presenting information in its entirety. |
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| abb | Apr 6 2015, 04:40 AM Post #920 |
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http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2015/04/06/rolling_stone_uva_campus_rape_story_columbia_issues_a_damning_report.html April 6 2015 12:47 AM Despite Damning Report, Rolling Stone Will Continue “To Do What We’ve Always Done.” Are They Serious? By Hanna Rosin Last night, Rolling Stone published a report explaining how it got the story of an alleged gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity so wrong. The report, co-written by Columbia School of Journalism dean Steve Coll, is an investigation into lapses in reporting, editing and fact-checking. It runs 13,000 words long—much longer than the original story—and uncovers many lapses, some of them (almost) understandable and others so basic that a first-year Columbia j-school student would be reprimanded for making them. Given all that, the final section of the report is the most surprising: Rolling Stone’s editors are “unanimous in the belief that the story's failure does not require them to change their editorial systems.” Are they serious? Did they read the report? The original story, written by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, pivoted on a horrific anecdote from a UVA freshman called “Jackie” who went on a date with a Phi Kappa Psi brother she called “Drew.” (The piece is no longer available online because Rolling Stone retracted it.) According to the story, he smuggled Jackie into a “pitch-black” room at the frat house and orchestrated a gang rape as some kind of hazing ritual. Jackie, whose real name was ultimately reported in the press, did not speak to the Columbia Journalism School—in fact, she hasn’t spoken publicly since the story started to unravel. In late March, the Charlottesville, Va. police, after a four-month investigation, concluded there was no basis to support Jackie’s account as told in Rolling Stone. It’s pretty clear at this point that Jackie made it up. But it’s also clear that Jackie was a very convincing storyteller. The report takes pains to distinguish this case from those of fabulists such as Jayson Blair or Brian Williams. Erdely thought she had a true story, and from the beginning Jackie tried hard to make it believable, telling the reporter in their first conversation, for example, that she arrived at the frat house at exactly 12:52. She remembered being smashed over a coffee table, hearing someone say, “Grab its motherf*cking leg.” All of this was in Erdely’s notes, which were turned over to the magazine before this investigation. Erdely interviewed her seven times, and she never wavered. Jackie even told the same story to T. Rees Shapiro, a Washington Post reporter who eventually debunked it. Given that, it would be tempting for Rolling Stone to say they got duped by a source. But this would be an unseemly thing to do, because lying sources are a hazard of the trade, and it’s the professionals’ job to spot them. In the magazine’s first apology back in December, managing editor Will Dana stated that their trust in Jackie was “misplaced”; he was roundly criticized and had to take it back in a series of tweets. Rolling Stone is no longer saying it’s Jackie’s fault. (Well, actually, Jann Wenner, the magazine’s publisher, almost said it, telling the New York Times yesterday that the story’s problems started with its source, a “really expert fabulist storyteller.”). But overall they are saying a modified version of Jackie-did-it which makes them look perhaps naïve and sloppy, but also respectful and kind. The magazine’s central narrative is still that most of the reporting mistakes happened because they were being overly sensitive to the wishes of a rape victim and did not want to re-traumatize her or have her pull out of the story. “We were too deferential to our rape victim,” Sean Woods, the story’s editor, told Columbia. “We honored too many of her requests in our reporting.” Erdely, too, is quoted regretting that the discussion she had with her editors was so focused on “how to accommodate her.” But the report soundly concludes that “deferential” and “accommodating” don’t cut it. The report’s most damning finding is that the magazine “did not pursue important reporting paths even when Jackie had made no request that they refrain.” These are “basic, even routine journalistic practice—not special investigative effort,” the report adds. “And if these reporting pathways had been followed, Rolling Stone very likely would have avoided trouble.” The worst mistake—the one that could have saved them from this mess—was the failure to track down the three friends who Jackie says she saw that night, right after she was raped. Erdely describes a scene in which the friends callously decline to take her to a hospital because they do not want to ruin their reputations. The clichéd dialogue should have made any editor suspicious (“We’ll never be allowed into any frat party again”). Erdely asked Jackie for their last names but she wouldn’t tell her; she asked a friend of Erdely’s who wouldn’t tell her either. Jackie continued to insist that at least one of the friends didn’t want to talk, but she never told Erdely she would drop out of the story if Erdely found them. Erdely should have looked harder, found them on Facebook, asked other friends, the report concludes. If she had they would have told her—as they later told Shapiro—that they never said those things, and that on the night in question, Jackie recounted a completely different story. That section of the report ends with a Journalism 101 lesson: “Checking derogatory information with subjects is a matter of fairness, but it can also produce surprising new facts.” In general the report is somewhat inconclusive about Erdely, who issued an apology yesterday. It hints that she went into the story with a strong agenda, looking for a “pervasive…rape culture” and a dramatic story to prove it. It contends that she is an experienced investigative reporter, although that doesn’t square that with the many examples of her taking short cuts whenever she could—for example, e-mailing fraternity leaders to get comments about allegations of a gang rape without giving them dates, names, or any details they could investigate. The report leaves the impression—without coming out and saying it—that Erdeoy maybe didn’t want to look too hard for outside sources who might contradict Jackie’s storyt. And it doesn’t mention that this isn’t the first time that Erdely has relied largely on uncheckable sources, or had her stories questioned. The report mentions possible backlash, including the worry that the Rolling Stone debacle will make it even harder to reform the prevailing systems for dealing with campus sexual assaults. I’m not sure the story actually did so much damage. The debate has continued, with more evidence and good ideas for reform stacking up. Hearing the Phi Kappa Psi chapter president Stephen Scipione say in the report that the Rolling Stone story tarnished their reputation and ruined their lives for the semester doesn’t lead you to conclude that no rape story is ever true and all accused men are innocent; it just sobers you up to realize that rape charges are a pretty serious affair that should be handled with as much care and thorough investigation as possible. As for reporting on sexual assault? I wouldn’t put my trust in Rolling Stone. No one at the magazine, or at an outside legal firm representing them, would comment on what the magazine’s lawyers said when they looked over the original draft of the story. No one is getting fired. And the editors, despite lots of apologies throughout, wind up sounding indifferent. Dana ended by saying they don’t need new ways of doing things; they “just have to do what we've always done and just make sure we don't make this mistake again." And Coco McPherson, head of fact-checking, said, "I one hundred percent do not think that the policies that we have in place failed. I think decisions were made around those because of the subject matter." Thankfully the report doesn’t end that way. It gives practical—and somewhat obvious—advice that will likely become required reading for journalism students. Avoid pseudonyms. Check derogatory information, in detail. If you’re reporting on rape, explain to victims, kindly, that you will have to check what they tell you, and if they’re not ready for that, both of you should be prepared to walk away. And I might add: Don’t hide behind the man who pays your salary. Just because he’s not firing you doesn’t mean you should keep doing what you’ve always done. |
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| abb | Apr 6 2015, 04:43 AM Post #921 |
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/04/05/libel-law-and-the-rolling-stone-uva-alleged-gang-rape-story-an-update-in-light-of-the-columbia-school-of-journalism-report/ Libel law and the Rolling Stone / UVA alleged gang rape story — an update, in light of the Columbia School of Journalism report By Eugene Volokh April 5 at 11:16 PM A just-released Columbia School of Journalism report details the errors in the Rolling Stone story describing an alleged gang rape. Can the original story lead to a libel lawsuit? I blogged about this question in December, and lots of people seemed interested, so I thought I’d update the analysis in light of the report. My basic conclusions are: The Columbia report provides powerful evidence that Rolling Stone was negligent in its investigation — and negligence is all that’s required for at least some kinds of damages to be recovered in some of the possible libel claims. It’s possible that the fraternity and perhaps its members might be able to sue, but the matter is complicated. UVA itself definitely can’t sue, because government agencies can’t sue for libel. Let me begin with who can or can’t sue, and then turn in part two to what they’d have to show. (If you read the December posts, you should move to part two, as part one is largely borrowed from those earlier posts.) 1. Possible plaintiffs: A. Individually recognizable alleged rapists: Naturally, if a story sufficiently identifies a real person, and falsely accuses him of rape (whether he participates through physical conduct or by egging on the rapists), he can sue. But “Drew,” the alleged victim’s date, and someone who allegedly lured her to the place where she was raped, isn’t identified by name — the story labels him as someone “whom we’ll call Drew.” He is identified as a junior, a Phi Kappa Psi member and a swimming pool lifeguard who worked with Jackie, the alleged victim. But that seems inadequate to point to anyone in particular, especially if it is true that — as the fraternity asserts – no Phi Kappa Psi member actually worked as a lifeguard. There just doesn’t seem to be a person to whom someone could reasonably (but mistakenly) point and say, “That’s probably that ‘Drew’ from the Rolling Stone article.” The matter might be different as to the alleged rapist whom Jackie says she recognized as having “attended her tiny anthropology discussion group.” If a Phi Kappa Psi member was indeed in that group, then he might be so identified by fellow group members, and by anyone they tell about this. (I think reasonable readers could infer from the article that all or most of the alleged rapists were claimed to be Phi Kappa Psi members.) I haven’t seen, though, any published reports confirming whether there was a Phi Kappa Psi member in that group. Likewise, if there was only one man in the discussion group, then he, too, could be reasonably perceived as the alleged rapist by readers who know he was in the group, but who don’t know what fraternity he was in — for instance, other discussion group members, or other classmates who had seen the discussion group together and remembered who was in it. The story also says that the rapists “called each other nicknames like Armpit and Blanket.” If those are actual nicknames of Phi Kappa Psi members, then they could have a case, on the theory that they were defamed in the eyes of those who knew the nicknames. Identifying an alleged criminal by his nickname can be libel, so long as some people would recognize the person by that nickname. But if these names are fictionalized (the “like” is somewhat ambiguous here), then again no one would be identifiable enough to qualify as a potential plaintiff under this theory. And I haven’t heard any indication since the November story came out that any particular fraternity members (or anthropology students) have been viewed by classmates or by others as the people labeled in Jackie’s account. B. The UVA Phi Kappa Psi fraternity members as a group: Can all members of the UVA Phi Kappa Psi chapter sue on the theory that the statement injures their reputations? There’s actually a considerable body of law on such questions. Restatement (Second) of Torts § 564A is generally considered a fair and influential summary of the law, and here are some key excerpts (slightly rearranged): One who publishes defamatory matter concerning a group or class of persons is subject to liability to an individual member of it if, but only if, (a) the group or class is so small that the matter can reasonably be understood to refer to the member, or (b) the circumstances of publication reasonably give rise to the conclusion that there is particular reference to the member. . . . [Comments:] When the group or class defamed is sufficiently small, the words may reasonably be understood to have personal reference and application to any member of it, so that he is defamed as an individual. In this case he can recover for defamation. Thus the statement “That jury was bribed” may reasonably be understood to mean that each of the twelve jurymen has accepted a bribe. It is not possible to set definite limits as to the size of the group or class, but the cases in which recovery has been allowed usually have involved numbers of 25 or fewer. [Some cases do allow recovery as to larger groups, perhaps up to 70 or so, though these are unusual. -EV] … Even when the statement made does not purport to include all of the small group or class but only some of them, as in the case of “Some of A’s children are thieves,” it is still possible for each member of the group to be defamed by the suspicion attached to him by the accusation. In general, there can be recovery only if a high degree of suspicion is indicated by the particular statement. Thus the assertion that one man out of a group of 25 has stolen an automobile may not sufficiently defame any member of the group, while the statement that all but one of a group of 25 are thieves may cast a reflection upon each of them. . . . Illustration 2. A newspaper publishes the statement that the officials of a labor organization are engaged in subversive activities. There are 162 officials. Neither the entire group nor any one of them can recover for defamation. . . . Illustration 3. A newspaper publishes a statement that the officers of a corporation have embezzled its funds. There are only four officers. Each of them can be found to be defamed. . . . Illustration 4. A magazine publishes the statement that most of the sales staff of a department store are homosexuals. The store employs 25 salesmen. It can be found that each of them is defamed. [Today, a charge of homosexuality may not be seen as defamatory, the way it was when the Restatement (Second) was published, but that’s a separate issue. -EV] I don’t know how large Phi Kappa Psi is, but as I understand it there are 16,000 undergrads at UVA, of whom about 30 percent are in fraternities or sororities, and there are about 30 fraternities. Assuming that half of the Greek system members are men, there would be about 80 members per fraternity. If that’s about the size of Phi Kappa Psi, then it might be too large for the defamation-of-a-group theory to apply, especially because the allegation is about nine members (again, assuming the article is read as suggesting that all or most of the rapists were fraternity members). But on the other hand, the Rolling Stone article appears to suggest that this was an initiation ritual for the fraternity’s members, which could be seen as implying that most fraternity members had likewise participated in other gang rapes, or might identify a particular subgroup of fraternity members as likely participants. And that could indeed “cast a reflection upon each [fraternity member]” (to quote the Restatement) and “defame[ each] by the suspicion attached to him by the accusation.” Careful readers will have noticed that this defamation-of-a-group theory could apply much more firmly to the men in Jackie’s “tiny anthropology discussion group,” if there were only two or three: A man’s being identified as being 50 percent or even 33 percent likely to be a rapist certainly “casts a reflection” and “defames by the suspicion attached to him by the accusation.” Those men, though, would probably be identifiable as such only to a small number of people (unless they had somehow been publicly identified following the publication of the story, and I’ve heard no evidence of that). The damage to them probably would thus be considerably less than to the Phi Kappa Psi members. C. The fraternity as an organization: Corporations and unincorporated associations that have recognized legal identities (such as unions, partnerships and the like) can also sue for defamation that causes injury to their organizational reputation, independently of whether any member was defamed. For instance, if someone falsely accuses a corporation of defrauding customers, this might hurt the corporation’s reputation even apart from injury to any particular employee’s reputation. And this is true even for nonprofit corporations, see, e.g., Lega Siciliana Social Club, Inc. v. St. Germain (Conn. Ct. App. 2003); Gorman v. Swaggart (La. Ct. App. 1988) (yes, that’s the Swaggart you’re thinking of). As the Restatement (Second) of Torts § 561(b) puts it, One who publishes defamatory matter concerning a corporation is subject to liability to it . . . if, although not for profit, it depends upon financial support from the public, and the matter tends to interfere with its activities by prejudicing it in public estimation. The allegations of such group misconduct at the fraternity house certainly do harm the fraternity as an organization “in public estimation.” Therefore, if the chapter has independent legal existence, whether as a corporation or as an unincorporated association, and if it can show loss of income from potential members or from donors — or other loss stemming from, for instance, punishment by the university — then it could potentially prevail on this. And the central fraternity could also sue for similar losses, on the theory that its reputation has been tarnished both at UVA and elsewhere. On the other hand, the organizations can’t recover damages for the emotional distress flowing from the injury to their reputations (since they lack emotions). Individuals can recover such emotional distress damage, even above and beyond actual lost income. D. Identified university officials or identifiable allegedly callous friends of Jackie’s: I won’t talk about this much, because this post is already very long. But I should note that one university official has said that his public statements were mischaracterized in the Rolling Stone article, and another university official has said that Rolling Stone “made numerous false statements and misleading implications” about how the official acted “as the Chair of University of Virginia’s Sexual Misconduct Board.” If those statements are indeed false, then they may be seen as defamatory and thus potentially libelous. (In many states, even nondefamatory falsehoods about a person can be actionable under the “false light” tort if they would be highly offensive to a reasonable person; but the false light tort isn’t recognized in Virginia.) E. The university itself: The university cannot sue. New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (1964) famously held that government officials can prevail in defamation lawsuits only if they can show that the defendant knew the statement was false, or was reckless about the possibility of falsehood – but it also, less famously, held that government entities can’t sue for defamation, period, regardless of the defendant’s mental state: For good reason, “no court of last resort in this country has ever held, or even suggested, that prosecutions for libel on government have any place in the American system of jurisprudence. “[P]rosecutions for libel on government,” the court repeated in Rosenblatt v. Baer (1966) – in a context that covered lawsuits and not just criminal prosecutions – are something that “the Constitution does not tolerate in any form.” And the Virginia Supreme Court echoed this in Dean v. Dearing (Va. 2002). So even if someone deliberately lies about the University of Virginia, and this lie damages the university’s reputation, the university can’t win a libel lawsuit against the person. Now if someone says about a private university that it doesn’t adequately protect its students (because it doesn’t adequately investigate alleged rapes and thus doesn’t do enough to prevent future rapes), that might be a libel of the university. Compare Mzamane v. Winfrey (E.D. Pa. 2010) (that’s the Winfrey), which holds that an allegation that a junior high school principal doesn’t do enough to investigate alleged abuse of students could be defamatory; I think a similar allegation about a university official could be defamatory of that official, and of the university more broadly, in the right circumstances. Likewise, even apart from a claim of culpable lack of investigation, if someone says there was a serious crime against a patron of a particular establishment — whether a bar, a hotel or a university – and the speaker knows the statement is false or recklessly disregards the risk of falsehood, that might be the tort of “injurious falsehood.” (This could also be labeled a form of the “trade libel” tort, but as to quality of services and not quality of goods.) The Restatement (Second) of Torts § 623A provides that, One who publishes a false statement harmful to the interests of another is subject to liability for pecuniary loss resulting to the other if (a) he intends for publication of the statement to result in harm to interests of the other having a pecuniary value, or either recognizes or should recognize that it is likely to do so, and (b) he knows that the statement is false or acts in reckless disregard of its truth or falsity. Under the right circumstances, reporting that there was a particular rape at or near a private university, knowing the statement was false or reckless about the possibility of falsehood, might thus be actionable on this theory as well. But none of this matters here, because the University of Virginia is a public university, and like other public entities — police departments, government-run ski resorts, cities, counties, states or the federal government itself — it cannot take advantage of the libel claims that are available to nongovernmental organizations. 2. Say that a fraternity member, all fraternity members, or the fraternity itself can sue, and say that the statements are false and defamatory. What more do the plaintiffs need to show to prevail? A. The fraternity members are almost certainly “private figures,” and I suspect that the local chapter and even the national fraternity likely would be, too. When an organization is a public figure is an unsettled question. Believe it or not, Computer Aid, Inc. v. Hewlett-Packard Co. (E.D. Pa. 1999) concluded that Hewlett-Packard isn’t a public figure, and although I think that’s wrong, public figure status isn’t as broadly imposed on corporations as one might think. In particular, a precedent in the federal Fourth Circuit (which contains Virginia), Blue Ridge Bank v. Veribanc, Inc. (4th Cir. 1989) concludes that the bank wasn’t a public figure. This suggests that a fraternity chapter and even the national fraternity probably wouldn’t be one, either. And, again, the individual members wouldn’t be public figures, unless there’s something about them that I don’t know. B. Private figures can recover for “actual harm inflicted by defamatory falsehood” — including “impairment of reputation and standing in the community, personal humiliation, and mental anguish and suffering” — if they can show that the defendant was negligent in its investigation. Here, the report seems quite damning. It documents what strike me as major departures from reasonable investigative journalism practices; read the report or the excerpts I posted, and I think you’ll be persuaded. C. Private figures can also recover “presumed damages” — damages aimed at compensating for likely harm to reputation even if no specific financial loss can be proved — and punitive damages if the defendant published statements knowing that they were false, or with reckless disregard of the risk of falsehood. (This is often called the “actual malice” standard, though that is a legal term of art that has little to do with “actual malice” in the plain English sense of the word; I’ll instead call this the “recklessness” standard, since in this case the allegation would be that Rolling Stone was reckless about the risk of falsehood, not that it deliberately lied.) Even public figures can recover actual damages, presumed damages, and punitive damages if they can show this recklessness as to falsehood. The difference between private and public figures here is just that private figures can recover actual damages based on just a showing of negligence. This recklessness standard requires proof that the defendant was subjectively aware of a strong likelihood of falsehood; negligent (and even grossly negligent) failure to investigate, by itself, doesn’t prove recklessness. But when reporters and editors had reason to think that a charge is “highly improbable,” and were “aware that [someone] was a key witness and that they failed to make any effort to interview [him],” that could be evidence that “the [publication’s] inaction was a product of a deliberate decision not to acquire knowledge of facts that might confirm the probable falsity of [the accuser’s] charges.” (I quote here from Harte-Hanks Communications Inc. v. Connaughton (1989); see also Curtis Publishing Co. v. Butts (1967).) Moreover, while different people might dispute whether the accusations here were indeed “highly improbable,” a plaintiff could subpoena the editors and ask whether they themselves consciously entertained doubts about the story. Herbert v. Lando (1979) confirms that such discovery is potentially available. If the discovery reveals that some editors did think this story was highly improbable, or otherwise had doubts about it, that conscious doubt coupled with the “fail[ure] to make any effort to interview” “key witness[es]” could be sufficient evidence of “a deliberate decision not to acquire knowledge of facts that might confirm the probable falsity of [the accuser’s] charges.” And that in turn would satisfy the recklessness standard. This recklessness standard is much harder to meet than the negligence standard. (That’s why it’s important that the plaintiffs probably could collect substantial damages even under the negligence standard, assuming the hurdles in part one above are passed.) And it’s impossible to tell whether the recklessness standard can be met without knowing more about the currently confidential details of the Rolling Stone investigation. But, unlike in many libel cases, I do think that it’s conceivable that this standard could be met here. * * * Let me stress again, though, that the most interesting and important issues raised by this controversy — whether about rape, about the proper procedures for considering allegations of rape, or about journalistic ethics — are not issues related to libel law. But libel law is the area that I am most equipped to discuss here. Eugene Volokh teaches free speech law, religious freedom law, church-state relations law, a First Amendment Amicus Brief Clinic, and tort law, at UCLA School of Law, where he has also often taught copyright law, criminal law, and a seminar on firearms regulation policy.[/s] Edited by abb, Apr 6 2015, 04:47 AM.
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| abb | Apr 6 2015, 04:49 AM Post #922 |
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/inquiry-of-rolling-stone-u-va-rape-story-finds-series-of-journalistic-lapses/2015/04/05/666e3932-c8de-11e4-a199-6cb5e63819d2_story.html Rolling Stone retracts discredited U-Va. rape story By Paul Farhi and T. Rees Shapiro April 5 at 8:00 PM A months-long investigation into a flawed Rolling Stone magazine article about an alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia has concluded that the story reflected failures at virtually every level, from reporting to editing to fact-checking. In a 12,000-word report that reads like a reportorial autopsy, a three-person team at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism called the November article “a story of journalistic failure that was avoidable. . . . The magazine set aside or rationalized as unnecessary essential practices of reporting” that would likely have exposed the story as dubious. Rolling Stone, which requested and cooperated with the probe, is publishing the Columbia exposé. The report serves as the magazine’s full explanation of how the story — “A Rape on Campus” — came about. Rolling Stone retracted it Sunday evening, and Managing Editor Will Dana and author Sabrina Rubin Erdely both issued apologies when the Columbia analysis was published. Also on Sunday evening, U-Va. President Teresa Sullivan said in a statement: “Rolling Stone’s story, ‘A Rape on Campus,’ did nothing to combat sexual violence, and it damaged serious efforts to address the issue. Irresponsible journalism unjustly damaged the reputations of many innocent individuals and the University of Virginia. Rolling Stone falsely accused some University of Virginia students of heinous, criminal acts, and falsely depicted others as indifferent to the suffering of their classmate. The story portrayed University staff members as manipulative and callous toward victims of sexual assault. Such false depictions reinforce the reluctance sexual assault victims already feel about reporting their experience, lest they be doubted or ignored.” The magazine story detailed the brutal gang rape of a student identified only as Jackie, allegedly by seven members of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity at U-Va., while two other people watched, during a party in September 2012. Erdely is a contributing editor to the magazine. The story set off protests at the Charlottesville school over what the article described as the university’s indifferent handling of Jackie’s allegation. It also led the university to suspend all fraternity and sorority social functions and touched off a wide-ranging discussion about sexual violence on college campuses. But the story quickly fell apart after journalists began questioning details. The Post exposed numerous discrepancies and journalistic shortcomings in Erdely’s lengthy narrative. The Columbia investigation essentially confirms the earlier criticism and adds new details about the story’s gestation and development, offered by the magazine’s journalists, who have generally remained silent since the story’s flaws were exposed. The report cites several major reporting failures. The principal one was Erdely’s, and ultimately her editor’s: almost total reliance on Jackie’s account of what occurred on the night of Sept. 28, 2012, when Jackie said she was lured by a date to an upstairs bedroom at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house and repeatedly assaulted. The magazine essentially failed to find corroboration for Jackie’s account from others — students, university administrators, law enforcement officials — but published her story regardless. Despite presenting in her story comments from three friends who advised Jackie that night not to report the rape, Erdely never spoke with those friends and made little effort to do so, the report confirmed. The friends — Ryan Duffin, Kathryn Hendley and Alex Stock — said Erdely never contacted them and denied that they had told Jackie to remain silent about the alleged crime. In fact, Erdely wrote in her article that she had contacted Duffin and that he declined to be interviewed. That statement is apparently false; Duffin told The Post he was never contacted by Rolling Stone. “In hindsight,” the report said, the most crucial decision that Rolling Stone made was not contacting the three friends. “That was the reporting path, if taken, that would almost certainly have led the magazine’s editors to change plans.” In public statements and in its apology, Rolling Stone and Erdely also apparently misrepresented the notion that they declined to contact “Drew” — Jackie’s supposed date on the night of the alleged rape — because of an agreement with Jackie not to do so. In fact, the Columbia report makes clear, there was no such agreement. “Jackie made no demand that Rolling Stone not try to identify Drew,” the report’s authors wrote, noting that Jackie even suggested Erdely check the fraternity’s roster to find him. Neither Erdely nor the magazine’s editors were able to contact or identify Drew, a fact that wasn’t disclosed in the original story. Dana, the managing editor, told the Columbia investigators that he was unaware that Erdely and her editor, Sean Woods, didn’t know “Drew’s” real name and hadn’t tried to confirm his existence before publication. Nor, he said, was he told that Erdely had made an agreement with Jackie not to try to speak with him. But, in fact, there was no such agreement — just a request from Jackie that Erdely refrain from doing so. The report was written by Sheila Coronel, the dean of academic affairs at the journalism school; Steve Coll, the dean of the school; and Derek Kravitz, a post-graduate research scholar and former Metro reporter for The Post. In an interview, Coll, a former managing editor at The Post, said they found no evidence of dishonesty in the reporting — no “inventing facts, lying to colleagues, plagiarism or such, that I would think of as grounds for automatic firing or serious sanction.” He added: “Of course, it’s true that some of the mistakes were pretty basic. But it seemed important to spell them out. More and more reporters now work outside of big, confident institutions. The details of what it means to check facts or seek comment aren’t always obvious to them.” On Sunday, Erdely said in a statement: “I want to offer my deepest apologies: to Rolling Stone readers, to my Rolling Stone editors and colleagues, to the UVA community, and to any victims of sexual assault who may feel fearful as a result of my article. . . . In the case of Jackie and her account of her traumatic rape, I did not go far enough to verify her story.” In his Sunday e-mail, Dana told The Post that he thinks “the report is accurate and fair,” adding that he had come to many of the same conclusions after going through all the transcripts and the reporter’s notes after the story was questioned. The report blamed both Dana and Woods for not spotting the weaknesses in Erdely’s account and for not insisting on more reporting. In a related note, Nicole Eramo, a U-Va. dean directly involved in Jackie’s case, told the Columbia investigators through her lawyer that the article “falsely attributed” statements to her that she never made to Jackie, including the article’s assertion that she had called U-Va. “the rape school.” The report also blamed Erdely for holding preconceptions about the response to sexual assault on college campuses: “Erdely believed the university was obstructing justice. . . . Jackie’s experience seemed to confirm this larger pattern.” As a further prescriptive, the report recommended banning the use of pseudonyms, checking derogatory information more fully, and sharing reporting details with sources to get a full response. Dana told The Post that although Rolling Stone’s procedures were essentially sound — and “failed in this one instance” — the magazine will be implementing suggestions the report makes. He added, though, that he expects that Erdely will continue to write for the magazine. “Sabrina’s done great work for us over the years and we expect that to continue,” he said in his e-mail. Last month, Charlottesville’s police chief announced that his department was unable to confirm the gang-rape allegations published in the magazine. The police review, which included interviews with 70 individuals connected to the case, also showed that university administrators acted quickly to offer assistance to Jackie and investigate the allegations. The three students mentioned in the article told The Post that Jackie said she had been forced to perform oral sex on five men. The Charlottesville police report noted that Jackie shared a similar account with university administrators. Sullivan said in a November 2014 statement that the Rolling Stone account disclosed “many details that were previously not disclosed to University officials.” Jackie’s lawyer, Palma Pustilnik, declined to comment to The Post on Columbia’s report. The magazine, its managing editor said, “has tried to reach out to [Jackie] without success.” Sexual assault survivors told The Post after the Rolling Stone article was published that the magazine had not accurately portrayed the administration response to sexual violence on campus. Columbia’s report found the same. U-Va. student Alex Pinkleton, who survived a rape and an attempted rape during her first two years on campus, told Columbia that Rolling Stone’s failures had potentially fostered a chilling environment for students to report sexual assaults. “It’s going to be more difficult now to engage some people . . . because they have a preconceived notion that women lie about sexual assault,” Pinkleton said. Phi Psi fraternity members told Columbia what they had earlier told The Post: that the magazine’s allegations left their fraternity reeling as they questioned themselves about the validity of the Rolling Stone account. The Phi Psi house was vandalized, and frat members went into hiding after they were portrayed in the magazine as callous predators. Ultimately, Phi Psi members were able to quickly establish through financial and digital records that the fraternity had not hosted a party on the night of Sept. 28, 2012. In addition, no Phi Psi member’s name resembles the one Jackie gave as her attacker’s. “It’s completely tarnished our reputation,” Stephen Scipione, president of the U-Va. chapter of Phi Psi, told Columbia. In a statement in response to the Charlottesville police review, the fraternity said that it was exploring legal options after the Rolling Stone article was discredited. Paul Farhi is The Washington Post's media reporter. T. Rees Shapiro is an education reporter. |
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| cks | Apr 6 2015, 06:06 AM Post #923 |
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So, when all is said and done - what do we have? 1. Rolling Stone says "Our bad - this one time. Won't happen again." No one fired - just a one time mistake. 2. Sullivan at UVA reaffirms that rape at universities is a problem and that there needs to be a culture change. 3. Phi Psi fraternity members receive no apology nor are they made whole from the physical damage incurred from the vandalism of their house. 4. Jackie goes unpunished for her false claims The fact that heads did not roll at either UVA or at Rolling Stone indicates that the much vaunted Columbia Journalism review of the article is worthless. |
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| Joan Foster | Apr 6 2015, 07:15 AM Post #924 |
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My rejected comment: For the sake of all the women who have been brutalized, mistreated, and ignored, it is time to call "Jackie" just what she is: a "cat fishing" attention-seeking liar. Feminists do a great disservice to real victims by denying her culpability in this fiasco...just a a fish merchant who denies a stinking fish does not improve the salability of the rest of his catch. Jackie is a catfishing liar. Even if her defenders want to say that maybe somewhere, some other time, by somebody else, she was brutalized...she lied about countless details, large and small in this damning and damned story. She had opportunities to stop the lies, but she understood that Rolling Stone lusted after her story, and retreated and returned like a vixen who knew her game. Jackie is a catfishing liar. A rape accusation is a life changing matter. Lying about being raped is vile. No one forced Jackie to be part of a national story. Her cooperation with Rolling Stone belies her refusal to cooperate with police or UVA officials to keep others safe from her "rapists." UVA has no honor code if Jackie remains unpunished. Rape victims have no credible advocates, if those at the forefront of the Rape Crisis "movement" do not call out their own. Say it: Jackie is a catfishing liar. |
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| Quasimodo | Apr 6 2015, 07:18 AM Post #925 |
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I agree. What did it tell us that we did not already know? |
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| Quasimodo | Apr 6 2015, 07:32 AM Post #926 |
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POSTER COMMENT from another forum:
Edited by Quasimodo, Apr 6 2015, 07:32 AM.
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| kbp | Apr 6 2015, 07:45 AM Post #927 |
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I could not force myself to read further after the first paragraph had me scrolling down to see how many words they had used to fill it with qualifying details. |
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| Quasimodo | Apr 6 2015, 07:56 AM Post #928 |
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The old-time morality certainly has no place in modern journalism (or in PC-correctness). One example:
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| Joan Foster | Apr 6 2015, 08:18 AM Post #929 |
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http://article.cjr.org/q_and_a/columbia_journalism_school_interview.php I guess I’m wondering, then, how a reporter could make such a fundamental error. It’s a truism of journalism that a story looks differently depending on where you stand. And for the reporter, Sabrina Erdely, not to have made a more aggressive effort to track down Jackie’s friends or someone who was at the party, seems unfathomable. Do you guys have a theory of the case about what was going on in the reporter’s head? Coll: Well, what she told us was that she felt that it was important to stay close to Jackie throughout the reporting and to take no steps that would lead Jackie to believe that she was betraying their trust or their relationship by going around her. Now, why was that important? When we asked that question she said it was because she feared Jackie would withdraw from cooperation on the story. We asked her specifically, “Had you made some kind of a source arrangement with Jackie that required you ethically, had you entered into an ethical obligation, not to undertake this kind of independent checking.” She said, “No, it wasn’t an obligation, but I was worried that if I worked around her I would lose her participation in the story.” So that’s what she said. Now what would you conclude from that? It was that she, the reporter, had entangled herself in this story in a way that was unsound. That you have to be able to walk away from a subject like that if you feel that you can’t do your job for one reason or another. And she also, as the report I think shows, did independently attempt to verify some things. So it wasn’t as if she never tried to work around Jackie. It wasn’t as if she was never prepared to take the risk of jeopardising Jackie’s cooperation by appearing to doubt the story. But Erdely’s behavior wasn’t consistent in that way. So sometimes she did try to independently look for things, but then she’d stop. And other times she told us that she hadn’t looked for things because she was afraid that Jackie would find out and withdraw from the story. But when a reporter gets so committed to their narrative, isn’t that where an editor steps in? Coronel: Ideally editors should step in. But I think in this case both editors who supervised Erdely also believed in Jackie’s story. They thought of her as a whistleblower. Someone who had taken great risks to be able to tell the story and was still at risk if her identity and the identity of her attackers were going to be revealed, and so they thought they were protecting her. And in the end they realised that by trying to protect her they made her even more vulnerable. Coll: But again, the editors, in the same way, they thought about these questions. It wasn’t as if they had a meeting and they said “OK, after careful review, we’re not going to try to find the three friends, and we’re just going to take the risk that Jackie’s version of the story is correct.” In fact, the editor recalls asking the reporter “Can’t you find the three friends?” And the reporter says, “I wish I’d been pushed harder to find the three friends. It occurred to me that someone was going to tell me to go do this.” So they were around the issue, they just didn’t follow through. Can you talk about the notion of “confirmation bias,” this idea that we’re all instilled with beliefs about how the world works and it becomes hard for us to see the need to find alternative views. It’s a concept that I think can apply to so much in journalism. Coronel: I see this a lot in my students. They have a theory of the case, or a theory of how this story went, or a narrative that they believe is plausible, and they try and report according to that theory rather than against it. So ideally you should be reporting both sides of the story. You should be trying to prove your theory or hypothesis, but also reporting against your hypothesis. In this case they interpreted a lot of information as proof that their story, or their view of the story, was correct. So, for example, when they said that Emily Renda provided congressional testimony, they took that to mean that the [University of Virginia] knew and that they didn’t do anything and they knew all the details of her case because they already had this preconceived notion about what Jackie was saying, the truth of her story, and what she had reported to the university. So I guess they, for the most part, by believing her, they didn’t try to look for additional information that would verify her story, and they interpreted information in the light of what they felt the story was." Much more worth reading at link. Edited by Joan Foster, Apr 6 2015, 08:19 AM.
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| Quasimodo | Apr 6 2015, 08:33 AM Post #930 |
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As Sherlock Holmes advised, you don't start with a theory of a crime and then search for facts to prove it; you start with the facts, and let them lead to you a conclusion. Elementary... |
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9:15 AM Jul 11