| UVA Rape Story Collapses; Duke Lacrosse Redux | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Dec 5 2014, 01:45 PM (60,440 Views) | |
| cks | Apr 6 2015, 12:02 PM Post #946 |
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As I said, it is the narrative that is important. Reading between the lines, Columbia's esteemed Journalism School's committee is saying "What is the problem here ? Nobody was falsely accused - so , no harm, no foul. Move on - case closed." |
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| MikeKell | Apr 6 2015, 12:09 PM Post #947 |
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Still a Newbie
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Can't remember where I saw it (maybe here??) but a law professor analyzed the situation of the frat suing and it was basically: if you sue, Rolling Stone gets to open all the closets and look for all the skeletons. So nothing happened in Sept 2012, but if they get women coming out to defend their survivor sister, then watch out. This may be a case where it may have been better to leave well enough alone, as nauseous as that may sound. |
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| abb | Apr 6 2015, 12:16 PM Post #948 |
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http://money.cnn.com/2015/04/06/media/phi-kappa-psi-rolling-stone-legal-action/index.html Phi Kappa Psi to 'pursue all available legal action' against Rolling Stone By Brian Stelter @brianstelter The Phi Kappa Psi fraternity at the University of Virginia said Monday that it is moving forward with a possible lawsuit against Rolling Stone magazine in the wake of the now-retracted "Rape on Campus" article. "After 130 days of living under a cloud of suspicion as a result of reckless reporting by Rolling Stone magazine, today the Virginia Alpha Chapter of Phi Kappa Psi announced plans to pursue all available legal action against the magazine," the fraternity said in a statement. The fraternity hasn't made a formal decision yet on when to file a suit, a spokesman said. The announcement came one day after the magazine published a damning external review of the editorial processes that resulted in the article's publication. The Rolling Stone article had alleged that a freshman student named Jackie had been gang raped during a Phi Kappa Psi frat party in September 2012. But soon after the article was printed last November, contradictions and discrepancies in Jackie's account emerged. The frat came out and denied that a party even took place on the night of the alleged attack. In December, the magazine apologized for the article and asked the Columbia University Journalism school to review what went wrong. One of Columbia's main conclusions was that the writer of the article, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, and her editors should have been much more forthcoming in her contacts with Phi Kappa Psi. If Rolling Stone "had given the fraternity a chance to review the allegations in detail, the factual discrepancies the fraternity would likely have reported might have led Erdely and her editors to try to verify Jackie's account more thoroughly," the review said. According to the review, "none of the editors ever discussed with Erdely" whether frat officials had been given enough detail about the charges. She "never raised the subject with her editors." In a statement on Monday, Stephen Scipione, the president of the Phi Kappa Psi chapter, said "this type of reporting serves as a sad example of a serious decline of journalistic standards." "A lot of people threaten defamation and don't follow through with a lawsuit," HLN legal analyst Joey Jackson said on CNN on Monday afternoon. "In this case, it's hard to argue that there were not tangible, recognizable reputational injuries. This story went viral. Everyone was talking about it." CNNMoney (New York) April 6, 2015: 1:06 PM ET |
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| cks | Apr 6 2015, 12:18 PM Post #949 |
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But this has nothing to do with prior behavior - plus, a fraternity's membership changes by 1/4 every year as one class graduates and a new one is initiated. It has to do with this false accusation - pure and simple. Frankly, I hope that the fraternity gets the keys to Rolling Stone and Jan Wenner's millions. |
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| abb | Apr 6 2015, 12:18 PM Post #950 |
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http://reason.com/blog/2015/04/06/rolling-stones-uva-rape-story-wasnt-just Rolling Stone’s UVA Rape Story Wasn’t Just Wrong—It Was Deliberately Misleading The botched story withheld key details about the magazine's reporting. Peter Suderman|Apr. 6, 2015 12:52 pm The full report on Rolling Stone’s botched story about an alleged rape at a University of Virginia frat house went online last night. The 12,000 word document, produced by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, is incredibly detailed and incredibly damning. It pins the story’s flaws on failures of reporting, editing, and fact-checking up and down the line. But perhaps the most damning thing to come out of the report—in combination with the surrounding coverage—is that not only did Rolling Stone’s editorial team get the story wrong, they made editorial choices, and statements to the press, that obfuscated important details about the reporting that went into the story and what it had actually confirmed. The two biggest flaws in the reporting were 1) the failure to contact any of the three friends that the story’s victim, Jackie, told reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely that she spoke to the night the assault she described took place, and 2) the failure to contact or even verify the existence of the lead assailant, an individual that Jackie claimed worked as a pool lifeguard with her. Yet despite the fact that Erdely never made contact with any of them, the story contains unflattering direct quotes from the three friends, including one in which a friend says that it would be a “shit show” on campus if word got out about her frat-house assault. It also describes various details about the lead assailant, dubbed "Drew" for the purposes of the story, none of which Erdely verified at all, indeed, none of which she could have verified given that she never confirmed his existence. In both cases, the decision was made to use pseudonyms for the individuals who weren’t contacted. The tactic is revealing about the problems with the story, but also about how Rolling Stone tried to mask those problems. As Sheila Coronel, Columbia Journalism School’s Dean of Academic Affairs, tells CJR in an interview about the report, “pseudonyms were used mainly to paper over gaps in the reporting. Of all the many reasons you might want to use pseudonyms, this one should never be considered.” The decision to use pseudonyms, in other words, was made in order to cover for the fact that critical story details hadn’t been verified. In addition, the report notes that Erdely’s editor on the story, Sean Woods, made the decision to remove language noting that Erdely had not contacted “Drew” or even been able to identify him. As the Columbia report on the article says… Rolling Stone's editors did not make clear to readers that Erdely and her editors did not know "Drew's" true name, had not talked to him and had been unable to verify that he existed. That was fundamental to readers' understanding. In one draft of the story, Erdely did include a disclosure. She wrote that Jackie "refuses to divulge [Drew's] full name to RS," because she is "gripped by fears she can barely articulate." Woods cut that passage as he was editing. He "debated adding it back in" but "ultimately chose not to." That’s not a reason. It’s not even an excuse. It’s just a decision to hide pertinent information from readers. Woods chose to remove language that would have clarified what the reporting had and hadn’t established. He chose to make the story less transparent. And he did it more than once. An early draft of Erdely’s story included a note—not an actual story line—indicating that the account of Jackie’s assault, including the quotes from the three friends is entirely in “Jackie’s POV.” Woods decided to allow those quotes (including one in which one of the friends says it would be a “shitshow” if she followed up against her attacker) to run without alerting the reader that they came entirely from Jackie’s recollection. From the Columbia report: Woods allowed the "shit show" quote from "Randall" into the story without making it clear that Erdely had not gotten it from him but from Jackie. "I made that call," Woods said. Not only did this mislead readers about the quote's origins, it also compounded the false impression that Rolling Stone knew who "Randall" was and had sought his and the other friends' side of the story. Again, a decision was made to avoid providing all the relevant information to the readers. It was functionally a decision, as the report says, to mislead readers. That approach carried over into the interviews that Erdely and Woods gave after the story was published and questions arose about its accuracy. On a Slate podcast, Erdely was extremely vague when responding to questions about whether she had talked to or communicated with the accused. "Yeah, I reached out to them [the accused] in multiple ways," Erdely told Slate. But, she said, "they were kind of hard to get in touch with because their contact page was pretty outdated." So she "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.” Questioned repeatedly about whether she had contact “the boys” and the “actual boys” in question, Erdely declined to answer directly. She had plenty of opportunity to answer the questions and explain what she had done. She declined to do so. In a separate follow-up, editor Sean Woods admitted to The Post that Rolling Stone had not contacted the story’s alleged attackers. But he also claimed that they had confirmed their identities: Sean Woods, who edited the Rolling Stone story, said in an interview that Erdely did not talk to the alleged assailants. “We did not talk to them. We could not reach them,” he said in an interview. However, he said, “we verified their existence,” in part by talking to Jackie’s friends. “I’m satisfied that these guys exist and are real. We knew who they were.” (A spokesperson for Rolling Stone later told the Post that Woods "misspoke" when describing efforts to contact the alleged assailants.) In the same Post story, Erdely again refused to directly answer questions about what she had verified: Erdely declined to address specific questions about her reporting when contacted on Sunday and Monday. “I could address many of [the questions] individually . . . but by dwelling on this, you’re getting sidetracked,” she wrote in an e-mail response to The Post’s inquiry. “As I’ve already told you, the gang-rape scene that leads the story is the alarming account that Jackie — a person whom I found to be credible — told to me, told her friends, and importantly, what she told the UVA administration, which chose not to act on her allegations in any way — i.e., the overarching point of the article. THAT is the story: the culture that greeted her and so many other UVA women I interviewed, who came forward with allegations, only to be met with indifference.” She added, “I think I did my due diligence in reporting this story; RS’s excellent editors, fact-checkers, and lawyers all agreed.” Once again, we see a declsion not to be perfectly straight about exactly what reporting had been done, or exactly what that reporting had established. Yes, Erdely says that it was Jackie's story, as told by her, but she also insists that the story should be accepted based on the "diligence" of her reporting and her belief that the story is credible. This wasn’t an accident. It wasn't a slip-up. It was a choice, made repeatedly, to avoid being perfectly clear with readers and members of the media about what, exactly, the story had established. It was a choice to withhold or omit true and relevant information that would have changed how people viewed the story, which is to say that it was a choice to deceive them. This isn’t to say that anyone at Rolling Stone believed the story itself to be false. At the time of publication, at least, there’s everyone reason to believe that they thought it was true. As Erdely told the Post, it was a story that she found credible. (The Columbia report says that Erdely began having some doubts about a week after the story was published, when, in a follow up correspondence, Jackie couldn’t recall how to spell Drew’s last name.) That thinking, the belief that the story was true, is, I suspect, why the decision was made to remove information about what Erdely had actually verified. Erdely and her editors at Rolling Stone found the story to be credible—and chose not to include details that might have cast doubt on whether or not it was. (Reason's Robby Soave has already noted several conclusions that can be drawn from the Columbia report here.) Peter Suderman is a senior editor at Reason magazine. |
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| sdsgo | Apr 6 2015, 12:20 PM Post #951 |
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UVA fraternity to pursue legal action against Rolling Stone Fox News Phi Kappa Psi, the fraternity at the center of the Rolling Stone magazine story about an alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia, said Monday it plans to pursue "all available legal action" against the magazine. "Our fraternity and its members have been defamed," chapter president Stephen Scipione said in a statement. The fraternity called the story reckless. http://www.foxnews.com/us/2015/04/06/rolling-stone-apologizes-retracts-discredited-rape-story/ The fraternity may be too large a group of unnamed individuals for a defamation lawsuit, but we shall see. There could be other options. |
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| chatham | Apr 6 2015, 01:15 PM Post #952 |
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I expect a settlement. Rolling stone doesn need this negative publicity. |
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| Walt-in-Durham | Apr 6 2015, 01:25 PM Post #953 |
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Indeed, the fraternity may be too large a group. the Restatement (Second) of Torts § 564A is generally considered a fair and influential summary of the law. The Restatement (Second), says: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. . . . Eugene Volokh in an excellent excellent piece at the WAPO the WAPO describes the general law surrounding how big a group may be and still recover in tort against a publication. His conclusion is the fraternity may be too big. But, it's definitely a fact specific inquiry. However, Phi Kappa Psi, as a non-profit corporation might be able to recover. Restatement (Second) of Torts § 561(b) says: One who publishes defamatory matter concerning a corporation is subject to liability to it (b) 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. § 561(b) is more difficult for the fraternity because it needs to who it was prejudiced in the public estimation. However, in this case, the fraternity as a corporation can show damages. The repairs needed, time spent, in addition to the damage to its reputation. A quick and dirty review did not show any Virginia case law on topic. Walt-in-Durham Edited by Walt-in-Durham, Apr 6 2015, 01:27 PM.
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| Joan Foster | Apr 6 2015, 01:48 PM Post #954 |
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Walt, if so inclined, could the young man whose picture was sent to the friends as "Haven Monihan" (the rapist) sue? What about the four guys in a picture taken at the Frat that night? Though it shows there was no big party...they are on the scene of where she says a gang rape took place. What about just the guys that lived in the house that year? is Jackie off the hook because she was such a good liar? |
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| LTC8K6 | Apr 6 2015, 02:03 PM Post #955 |
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Assistant to The Devil Himself
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http://twitchy.com/2015/04/06/right-wing-tactics-tnrs-spin-on-rolling-stone-scandal-will-have-you-fuming/ ‘Right wing tactics’? TNR’s spin on Rolling Stone scandal will have you fuming |
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| abb | Apr 6 2015, 02:38 PM Post #956 |
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http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121462/rolling-stone-retracts-uva-rape-story-after-cjr-report?utm_content=bufferf16b2&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer Campus Rape April 6, 2015 Rolling Stone's Rape Article Failed Because It Used Rightwing Tactics to Make a Leftist Point By Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig @ebruenig If you type in the original page for Rolling Stone’s December 2014 story “A Rape on Campus: The Struggle for Justice at UVA,” you’ll be redirected to "What Went Wrong?,” a report about the article published Sunday by the Columbia Journalism Review. Rolling Stone officially retracted its blockbuster story, which had garnered more than 2.7 million views. The retraction comes on the heels of the Charlottesville Police Department’s announcement that there was not enough evidence to pursue an investigation of the story’s titular rape, which now appears to have been something between a delusion and a hoax. What did go wrong? A whole host of things, most of them probably more interesting to journalists than readers. There were dazzling editorial oversights, like the decision not to contact the three friends allegedly present on the night of the assault, and mundane human error, like the assumption that everyone who had heard Jackie’s story had been told the same tale. Still, the mother of all these blunders seems to have predated the article’s eventual litany of technical failures. Sabrina Rubin Erdely, the investigative journalist and true-crime writer who penned the essay, set out with an answer in search of a question, a conclusion about systematic indifference to rape which she needed the right story to backfill. If she had written a fictional account of a rape that met all her article’s needs, I can’t imagine it would have been too different than the horrifying one that issued from Jackie, which should have set off alarm bells then. Erdely apologized in a statement on Sunday. Her reasons don’t come off as particularly ignoble: She wanted to bring to light a problem with the way sexual assaults are handled on college campuses, and once she found Jackie she was unwilling to pressure her for details, names, or verifying facts because she did not want to re-traumatize her after her ordeal. Naturally, Rolling Stone’s mea culpa and Erdely’s apology have not satisfied a certain segment of the reactionary peanut gallery, with rightwing outposts like Twitchy deliriously bemoaning the fact that no one at the magazine has been fired over the meltdown, and declaring Erdely a hack for not apologizing specifically to the fraternity brothers accused of rape in her article. This suggests that the scope of the disaster is wider than the professional failures CJR documents with such unsettling clarity. Yes, there were an absurd number of mistakes in Rolling Stone’s journalistic method, but like most events ostensibly about ethics in journalism, the kernel of the controversy is about politics, not journalism. The politics, of course, inform the journalism. For better or worse (almost certainly worse), rape is a contested political property, and campus rape is its pinnacle. During last year’s ballyhoo over California’s campus affirmative consent law, the contingencies for and against split down the aisle: The left and center-left supported it, while the right and far-right opposed it. More importantly, similar political groupings tend to form around controversial cases. When Cathy Young reported skeptically on the case of Emma Sulkowicz, the Columbia undergraduate whose mattress-hefting protest made national news, Jezebel’s Erin Gloria Ryan called her out, and anti-feminist finger-waggers at the misleadingly titled American Thinker feted her insight. What accounts for the political polarization in rape journalism, which is presumably odious to everyone, regardless of political orientation? The left tends to view oppression as something that operates within systems, sometimes in clearly identifiable structural biases, and other times in subtle but persistent ways. Mortgage discrimination against black families over the last century is an example of a structural, on-the-books bias that had an extraordinarily damaging impact on African Americans; but the fact that black children are read as older and less innocent than their white peers, while neither a law nor a regulation, is of a piece with the overall oppression of black folks in America, resulting in subtle treatment by teachers and authority figures that alienates black children from wider society starting at a very tender age. These disparate forms of discrimination come together, in the left imagination, to form a tightly composed set of prejudices and policies that are difficult to disentangle. Making sense of oppression, therefore, requires looking at entire systems of oppression, not just specific instances or behaviors. The right, on the other hand, tends to understand politics on the individual level, which fits in neatly with a general obsession with the capital-i Individual. Thus, the right tends to pore over the specific details of high-profile cases like those of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, concluding that if those particular situations were embattled by complications or mitigating factors, then the phenomena they’re meant to represent must not be real either. And if a few highly publicized rapes turn out to be murkier than first represented, then rape itself is not a crisis, just a regrettable and rare anomaly. The positive version of this approach is the elevation of people like Joe the Plumber, individual cases that purportedly show the value and effectiveness of conservative politics. It isn’t great reasoning, but it is very appealing on a sub-intellectual level. Which is perhaps why, coupled with a leftist tendency to attempt to correct procedural injustices in representation, liberal activist journalism appears to be joining in the wider journalistic slide from big-picture work (anything from Upton Sinclair’s The Brass Check to John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World to Rolling Stone’s own investigation of the Fox News fear machine and Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed) toward pieces wherein structural analysis is unwholesomely pegged to personal tales. Pinning an indictment of a system on the story of an individual is essentially a rightwing tactic with a dodgy success rate; it’s a way of using an individual as a metonym for systematic analysis that both overplays the role of individual heroism and effort and underplays the complicated nature of oppression as a feature of institutions, policies, traditions, and persons. There is room in left journalism for the individual story, but the positioning is important: Individual narratives can give glancing glimpses of the effects of oppressive systems, but they can’t reveal their sum total. Here, pieces like ProPublica's longform investigation of workers' compensation are instructive: The personal story is supported by a hard frame of systematic analysis. The individual just isn’t enough. In balancing a systematic critique on a single person’s story, Erdely essentially used a rightwing strategy to make a leftist point. The trouble is only that the right is skilled at this game, and correctly deduced that undoing Jackie’s story would go a long way to endangering Erdely’s larger structural point. It’s an opportunity they never should have been given, both for Jackie’s sake, and for the sake of the victims who really do find themselves struggling for protection within a hostile justice system. Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig is a staff writer for The New Republic. |
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| Walt-in-Durham | Apr 6 2015, 02:53 PM Post #957 |
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I think that would be the strongest case.
I think that is more what the Restatement (Second) of Torts § 564A is really getting at. A small group suing, not a larger one. Four being clearly small and 70-80 (the presumed size of Phi Kappa Psi) being larger than groups that have been successful. Also, the discussion group whom she mentioned and the so called friends whom she flat out lied about.
Probably depends on the number of guys. If less than 70, the better the chances, I think.
Good question. "Drew" and the "Haven" seem to have a really good case against her. The problem is, she is probably judgment proof. I doubt she has a lot of money in her own right. Her job prospects are probably not good. At least the kind of job prospects that the usual U.VA. grad might have. But, that's not a reason not to sue her. Just a reason to make sure there are other defendants that can pay. Also, the Rolling Stone might want to name her. After all, she lied to them and to the extent they have damages, she caused them. Also, the Rolling Stone has a useful claim against the person who put them in contact with "Jackie." Another thought, because the Rolling Stone has commissioned the Columbia review and really done nothing, the various cases against them have just gotten better. Remember, the truth is an absolute defense, but here, not only is the falsehood of the story shown in the Rolling Stone's own report, but they've done nothing with that report. No one was fired. No one was demoted. Nothing. It's been my experience that most plaintiffs are very concerned with making sure no one else is victimized by a defendant's bad conduct in the future. The Rolling Stone is basically waiving a red cape in front of a bunch of bulls. They would be a lot better off to come out and say, "mistakes were made. First and foremost by Sabrina Ruben Ederly, but also by our fact checker and Will Dana our editor. Because these are really elementary mistakes of judgment, Ms. Ederly is no longer a contributor to the Rolling Stone, the fact checker is being reprimanded and Mr. Dana is having someone brought in to closely review his work." If I was defending the Rolling Stone, I would be a lot happier going into court and a whole lot happier going into a mediation knowing Sabrina Ruben Ederly was not on the mast head and I could disclose to the plaintiff we were taking steps to make sure this type of injustice would not happen in the future. Walt-in-Durham |
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| Joan Foster | Apr 6 2015, 03:14 PM Post #958 |
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Thank you so much, Walt.
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| MikeZPU | Apr 6 2015, 03:43 PM Post #959 |
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Ditto what Joan said re: the expert info provided by Walt ![]() On a different note, my interpretation of what I am reading re: what Rolling Stone (RS) is saying is that since everyone (at RS) was at fault, then no one will be disciplined in any way, shape, or form. In particular, Sabrina Erdely will still write for them. Also, it is correct to say that Erdely did not apologize directly to the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity, that she did not mention them specifically in her apology? That's ridiculous. Edited by MikeZPU, Apr 6 2015, 03:46 PM.
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| MikeKell | Apr 6 2015, 03:54 PM Post #960 |
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Still a Newbie
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MikeZPU: see post #917 above for exact quote. It is correct to say what you said! |
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