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UVA Rape Story Collapses; Duke Lacrosse Redux
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Topic Started: Dec 5 2014, 01:45 PM (60,441 Views)
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Duke parent 2004
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Apr 6 2015, 09:14 AM
Post #931
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- Quasimodo
- Apr 6 2015, 08:33 AM
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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.
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... Alternatively, you may want to start with that premier American journalist of the first half of the 20th Century, H. L. Mencken, who ruefully concluded that the great majority of writers were far more interested in making a noise than in getting to the nub of things.
In both halves of that century, the philosopher Karl Popper argued that science should proceed by a conscious and persistent effort to falsify even the most accepted of its theories.. (Popper, by the way, belittled induction as a way of getting to the truth.)
If Erdely ever read either of these fellows, she's disguised it well.
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Duke parent 2004
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Apr 6 2015, 09:23 AM
Post #932
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- MikeKell
- Apr 6 2015, 01:11 AM
Mike,
Regarding your last sentence above:.
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MikeZPU
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Apr 6 2015, 09:30 AM
Post #933
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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 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.”
Finally, a decent statement by Sullivan, although too little and too late.
Edited by MikeZPU, Apr 6 2015, 09:32 AM.
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MikeZPU
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Apr 6 2015, 09:32 AM
Post #934
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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.”
Think about that. Claiming that Duffin declined to be interviewed SURELY contributed to the notion that he had advised Jackie not to report the gang-rape, and Erdely knows that ... she did that on purpose!!!
I think Erdely should be fired. She needs to be held accountable.
Edited by MikeZPU, Apr 6 2015, 11:57 AM.
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MikeZPU
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Apr 6 2015, 09:36 AM
Post #935
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- Foxlair45
- Apr 5 2015, 07:55 PM
"Her behavior seemed consistent with a victim of trauma."
No, her behavior was consistent with being a patholoical liar. YES, you are exactly right!
And it was the same thing with Mangum!
Jackie is a pathological liar AND UVA Chief of Police Longo knows it too!
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Quasimodo
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Apr 6 2015, 09:45 AM
Post #936
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/04/06/from-u-va-to-ferguson-where-truth-and-justice-diverge.html
CONFIRMATION BIAS04.06.15 From U-VA to Ferguson, Where Truth and Justice Diverge
(snip)
Justice Department investigators have proven that Michael Brown was not simply pulled over and shot in the back with his hands up, but shot while attacking police officer Darren Wilson. However, black Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capeheart, after urging us to admit that the initial MSNBC take on the Ferguson encounter was inaccurate, has been deluged on Twitter with vicious slander for his insistence on admitting the truth. That slander is founded on an assumption: America needs to understand how disproportionately cops kill black men, and facts incompatible with that mission are irrelevant. To stress inconvenient truths is still unenlightened, missing the “larger point.”
The gravitational pull of “story-over-facts” has a way of making the frame of mind seem like wisdom. In the UVA case, Ryan Duffin, an undergraduate friend of Jackie’s, has internalized the story-over-facts gospel: “It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, because whether this one incident is true, there’s still a huge problem with sexual assault in the United States.” And there is, especially on college campuses. But that is not the lesson we should learn from the UVA case, which has simply shown the fine line between enlightenment and medievalism when it comes to seeking justice, and how it pollutes journalistic culture—and therefore enlightened conversation—in today’s America.
The fact that this denialist frame of mind is rarely explicitly spelled out is itself evidence of an ideology rather than one-off response. An ideology has roots, and Exhibit A in modern American culture may have been l’affaire O.J.
The gravitational pull of “story-over-facts” can seem particularly powerful in proudly progressive communities.
When the revelations about Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman’s murders were new in 1994, it was popular in the black community to assume that the Los Angeles Police Department had planted the incriminating evidence. But after a while, it became clear that denying Simpson had murdered two people was about as solid a case as the existence of Santa Claus. As such, from about 1995 on, the black person talking uncontroversially about O.J. had two choices. One either said “I don’t think he did it, but I think he knows who did it” (on the basis of no specific evidence) or copped out with “I’m tired of the whole thing.”
Pretty soon, a new mantra settled in: “It doesn’t matter whether he did it—what we really need to be talking about is the cops preying on black men. The “real deal” was that the facts didn’t matter—and this was a position heartily propounded not just by the man on the street, but journalists, academics, and fellow travelers. By 2002, Cedric the Entertainer’s character in the movie Barbershop could call on black America to admit “O.J. did it!” But this was amidst comedy—and yet still was taken as brave words.
Elevating narrative over fact is hardly limited to people tripping over their mental shoelaces in the heat of the moment. Among a school of legal scholars, critical race theory advises that we treat the long view as more useful than the close-up in our sense of the difference between right and wrong. One of critical race theory’s gurus, Richard Delgado, dismisses the “rigid” structures of objective truth in favor of a “broad story of dashed hopes and centuries-long mistreatment that afflicts an entire people and forms the historical and cultural background of your complaint.”
Under this perspective, treating the “story” as the facts becomes sign of mental sophistication.
[Recall Karla Holloway's "Bodies of Evidence"... the "facts" and their significance weren't necessarily going to be what emerged in the courtroom.]
(snip)
First: Neglecting facts will always seem just plain dumb and dishonest.
“Anti-empirical” is a more polite phrasing, but progressivism does itself no favors with know-nothing agitprop. In 1987, 15-year-old Tawana Brawley claimed to have been raped by white police officers and left tied up in the winter cold for days, and was loudly represented by Al Sharpton, Alton Maddox and C. Vernon Mason decrying the episode as evidence of the racism pervading society. A thorough investigation made clear that Brawley fabricated the story to avoid punishment for being out visiting a boyfriend (e.g. “hairs” she planted on herself to indicate rape turned out to be fibers from a sneaker she had ripped up). Yet many have insisted that Brawley’s tale was true “on some level,” with Brawley announcing as late as 1997 that “something happened to me” to a standing ovation from her audience, and a prominent law professor legitimizing Brawley’s lie in a widely read book as valuable in corresponding to black women’s general fears of rape, and undeniably “true” even if Brawley abused herself.
Let’s face it: While rape is an urgent issue, the idea that Brawley’s clumsy teenaged ploy was a teachable moment will always be at the very least goofy to the unbiased observer. The lie commands no respect and in fact, deflects it: Sharpton’s refusal to truly recant his participation in the episode is much of what keeps him from ever being taken quite seriously by so many.
(snip)
Three: Treating facts as inconvenient casts a pall of mendaciousness over legitimate cases of abuse.
The public has limited attention. Plus, theatrics last longer in memory than argumentation. The last thing progressive efforts need is association with exaggerations, distortions, and outright lies, leaving people on the sidelines with a sense that protest in general is a matter of people just “making noise.”
Date rape is an urgent matter. When I was in college in the early ‘80s, I knew a few women who were date-raped. However, the term didn’t exist yet, much less a space for discussing the concept. The further past those days we get, the better; today’s robust grappling with the issue must continue.
Yet, enshrining lies such as Jackie’s as some kind of consciousness-raising will play no meaningful role in that process. It plants a suspicion in less-committed observers—who must be engaged and convinced for real change to happen—that all charges of date rape are suspect. Also, the sensationalist nature of a case distrusted by all sources—a likely sign of its falsity—and then torn apart detracts attention from legitimate cases. Imagine being a woman who has suffered real abuse watching a nation obsessed by something a woman made up. Jackie’s “story” is no more than that of a self-indulgent liar who needs professional help.
Fourth: Pushing aside facts for stories too often means throwing someone else under the bus.
Ignoring the facts for a “story” inevitably means that a great deal of the facts must be left out. But what about the lives impacted by the lies?
For example, you likely recall the Duke lacrosse case, where a black stripper accused three white lacrosse players of raping her at a fraternity party, with a “Gang of 88” faculty writing a letter condemning the lacrosse players—and America—by extension. The accusation lit up the newswires for months, only to be conclusively judged as fraudulent. However, you are less likely to know that just before the Duke non-incident, four students (including two football players) from historically black Virginia Union University were accused of raping a white University of Richmond undergraduate after a party. Two of the students were convicted; one pleaded guilty to lesser charges.
Under what conception of justice was it fair that we only heard about the lacrosse players? People were more interested in one “narrative” than the other for reasons many will sense as justified—but surely the woman raped in the second case wonders why her case was treated as negligible.
In the same way, let us recall Phylicia Rashad asserting that Bill Cosby’s accusers’ experience is less important than Cosby supposedly being railroaded for being a powerful black man. It must be said that in phrasing it as “Forget those women,” Rashad did not mean it literally— she was using “forget” in an idiomatic way we all do at times, meaning “The important point is less the women than …” But here we were again with “What we really need to be talking about is …”—as in, this time, the “story” about racism is somehow more important than the “story” about rape.
***
The UVA hoax is what happens when these four things are not considered. But instead, Rolling Stone Editor Will Dana wanted to “have the story be more about the process of what happens when an assault is reported and the sort of issues it brings up.”
The italics are mine: more interested in a “story” than an engagement with facts, however uncomfortable or incompatible with the desired narrative. Well—aren’t we back to the “rigidity” of details that critical race theorists are so chary of?
We must beware those teaching that when speaking up for the underserved, facts, so precise, complex, and inconvenient, are less important than the predictability, emotionality, and even coziness of stories. This is thought’s primordial state, not its potential.
Make no mistake: The idea that facts are all that matter is blinkered. True thought requires climbing past the cloud cover to a mountaintop where one understands that context matters. However, to embrace the idea that the story is paramount and facts are beside the point is not to climb higher—one couldn’t—but to roll down the other side of the mountain and wind up back on the cold, hard ground.
End of story.
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MikeKell
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Apr 6 2015, 09:54 AM
Post #937
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Still a Newbie
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Erdely can't be fired, she is free-lance. She could be "not used again."
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cks
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Apr 6 2015, 10:03 AM
Post #938
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But she will be - because for Rolling Stone it will be important to show that it was the process not the story that was somehow at fault. After all, the narrative is most important.
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kbp
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Apr 6 2015, 10:55 AM
Post #939
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- Joan Foster
- Apr 6 2015, 08:18 AM
http://article.cjr.org/q_and_a/columbia_journalism_school_interview.phpI 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. [...] Much more worth reading at link. At some point Erdely and whatever pre-publication review by editors determined Rolling Stone was ready to publish the story. That point in time makes Jackie's cooperation of little value, as the story will hit the stands as written then.
What excuse is there for needing Jackie's cooperation then?
Any "effort to track down Jackie’s friends or someone who was at the party" may create questions for Jackie, but if she refuses to cooperate further, that is a part of the story to publish. That "cooperation" excuse doesn't seem to work IMO.
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cks
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Apr 6 2015, 11:15 AM
Post #940
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The bottom line is that Erdley (and by extension Rolling Stone) had a story she wanted to tell. And, following in the time honored Nifong tradition - there was no need to let any facts get in the way of the narrative because, as we all know, it is the narrative that is important. In this case that UVA, like other colleges with a strong Greek tradition, are bastions for sexual assaults and that the universities do their utmost to ignore or minimize those assaults. So, once she had a spectacular account (nothing sells like gang rape at a Greek house and furthermore as part of the ritual of initiation) it was full speed ahead. While "Jackie" may have expressed reluctance at times to be forthcoming with details - that played into the narrative as well of "traumatized victim". Because Rolling Stone was salivating at the story what should have been cooler heads in the editorial department refused to ask what were the obvious questions - instead green-lighting the story (think of the opportunities for free advertisement for Rolling Stone as this will be a major front page story on both the airwaves, print, and twitter sphere). Then, to add fire to the story, the feckless president of UVA does not do due diligence but instead rushes out (albeit from afar since she is at a conference or something) and condemns the Greek system and shuts it down (with NO EVIDENCE other than the article). The heroes in this story are those in the Washington newspaper who begin to question the story and do the investigating that Erdley should have done as due diligence when first researching and writing the article. It is interesting that Erdley nor Rolling Stone apologize to the men of Phi Psi or to the three "friends" of Jackie that were maligned. And of course, there is no apology from Sullivan to the Phi Psi fraternity either or the Greek system in general. But then, hey, it is the narrative that is important - any collateral damage is, well, the price that must be paid for the importance of furthering the narrative.
Columbia's journalism school does not come out of this with its head held high - rather, it is just one more self-serving institution that does not have the moral fiber to take a strong stand - after all, it hopes that its graduates will be able to get jobs in the future - at Rolling Stone and other such publications.
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chatham
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Apr 6 2015, 11:24 AM
Post #941
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No one's gonna be fired. Some of the editors should be but no, no one will be fired.
Time to just look at the cover of rolling stone rather than reading it at Barnes and Noble.
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kbp
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Apr 6 2015, 11:25 AM
Post #942
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- MikeZPU
- Apr 6 2015, 09:32 AM
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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.” Think about that. By claiming that Duffin declined to be interviewed SURELY contributed to the notion that he had advised Jackie not to report the gang-rape, and Erdely knows that ... she did that on purpose!!!
I think Erdely should be fired. She needs to be held accountable.
- From link Joan posted
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http://article.cjr.org/q_and_a/columbia_journalism_school_interview.php[...] Question: I notice that you make no recommendation about whether Rolling Stone should have retracted the piece, nor do you call for the removal of the writer or the editors involved. I wonder if you could explain why you decided to take that path. [...] Coll: ....I’d say, certainly in the news organizations where I’ve worked, both in those roles and not in those roles, there are some actions by journalists that are firing offenses and should be. Dishonesty, lying to your boss, lying to your peers about what you did or who you called, or inventing facts. ...Speaking only for myself and not for Sheila, if I had encountered evidence of that kind of conduct by anyone at Rolling Stone, if they had lied, if they had invented notes, if they had misled their colleagues or misrepresented themselves, then I would have been tempted to call for direct accountability. But that’s not the case here. This was a systematic and collective failure. But there is no evidence that anyone was dishonest in those ways. So that, to me, left it to Rolling Stone to judge.
This is a direct quote from the Columbia Journalism School Dean Steve Coll, who helped write Columbia's investigative report on the problems. Do we need an editorial staff to verify the accuracy of his reporting?
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kbp
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Apr 6 2015, 11:26 AM
Post #943
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- cks
- Apr 6 2015, 11:15 AM
...Columbia's journalism school does not come out of this with its head held high - rather, it is just one more self-serving institution that does not have the moral fiber to take a strong stand - after all, it hopes that its graduates will be able to get jobs in the future - at Rolling Stone and other such publications. Yeah, that's what I am seeing!
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kbp
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Apr 6 2015, 11:33 AM
Post #944
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We start with a false narrative that includes at least one direct lie from the reporter...
Approved by RS's editorial staff...
Investigated by Columbia's journalism...
Followed by Columbia interviewing their investigators..
Who tell us nobody lied...
So it was just a "systematic and collective failure"...
move along now...
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Joan Foster
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Apr 6 2015, 12:01 PM
Post #945
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Fraternity suing.
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