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UVA Rape Story Collapses; Duke Lacrosse Redux
Topic Started: Dec 5 2014, 01:45 PM (60,439 Views)
kbp

Walt-in-Durham
Apr 6 2015, 02:53 PM
....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
Old news...
Quote:
 
http://www.citypages.com/1996-06-19/music/a-good-blowfish-is-hard-to-find/
A GOOD BLOWFISH IS HARD TO FIND
Jun 19 1996
...a negative review of the new album by platinum snooze-rockers Hootie and the Blowfish, written by Senior Editor Jim DeRogatis, was killed and replaced with a more favorable review, written by contributor Elysa Gardner. DeRogatis, ex-music critic for The Chicago Sun-Times, was part of a spate of new hirings last year which brought fresh blood to the magazine. (Mark Kemp and Keith Moerer, former editors of Option and Request, respectively, were also brought on board.)

The Observer quoted a spokesman for Rolling Stone saying the review swap was a matter of writing quality and not opinion, and DeRogatis saying Rolling Stone Editor and Publisher Jann Wenner is not necessarily a Hootie fan, but "a fan of bands that sell eight and a half million copies" of a record. The day after the piece ran, DeRogatis was fired....

Back to the large group issue, RS did not name names for any besides the Frat.
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Joan Foster

So...is the false accusers name Jackie Coakley? If so, it should be used in every mention of this story. She is NOT a victim; she is a victimizer.


http://www.lukeford.net/blog/?p=60760
Edited by Joan Foster, Apr 6 2015, 05:01 PM.
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Joan Foster


Rolling Stone magazine failed an array of journalistic tests in publishing its November 2014 story “A Rape on Campus,” according to a new report from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. It failed to reach out to all kinds of sources who could have steered them away from the account of Jackie, the alleged victim of a gang rape at the University of Virginia’s Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house in September 2012. “The failure encompassed reporting, editing, editorial supervision and fact-checking,” says the report. “The magazine set aside or rationalized as unnecessary essential practices of reporting that, if pursued, would likely have led the magazine’s editors to reconsider publishing Jackie’s narrative so prominently, if at all.”

Which is to say that mistakes and mismanagement run up and down the Rolling Stone masthead, from the fact-checking department all the way up to the office of Managing Editor Will Dana.

Rolling Stone Publisher Jann Wenner, however, apparently found some other takeaways. In an interview with the New York Times, Wenner reportedly said that the story’s problems began with Jackie, a University of Virginia student unknown to the world until reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely chose to fixate on her wobbly story as the crowning anecdote of “A Rape on Campus.” From the Times piece:

The problems with the article started with its source, Mr. Wenner said. He described her as “a really expert fabulist storyteller” who managed to manipulate the magazine’s journalism process. When asked to clarify, he said that he was not trying to blame Jackie, “but obviously there is something here that is untruthful, and something sits at her doorstep.”

Sorry, you can’t refrain from blaming someone while at the same time laying “something” at their doorstep.

Then there’s Erdely, the reporter who found Jackie credible enough to hang a gang rape, plus other alleged instances of sexual assault, on her word alone. In Wenner’s worldview, however, Erdely had special powers. Again, the Times:

Ms. Erdely, Mr. Wenner said, “was willing to go too far in her effort to try and protect a victim of apparently a horrible crime. She dropped her journalistic training, scruples and rules and convinced Sean to do the same. There is this series of falling dominoes.”

Here, “Sean” is Sean Woods, whom the Columbia report identifies as the principal editor behind “A Rape on Campus.” He presided over the awful decision not to seek out Jackie’s alleged assaulters nor the three friends who could have debunked the central, false allegations of the story.

Think about what Wenner is saying here, however: The story’s author was so corrupt as to steamroll her editor with bogus reporting, and the editor was too weak to resist. And yet Woods is keeping his job; Erdely will continue writing for the magazine as well.
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Joan Foster

http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/06/opinions/louis-rolling-stone-uva-fraternity-debacle/index.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
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Baldo
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Joan Foster
Apr 6 2015, 05:18 PM
Having worked part time as a journalism professor for a decade (including one semester at Columbia), I would agree with colleagues who call Rolling Stone's lapses the kind that would be unacceptable in a freshman classroom. I've told students for years: You should never print allegations without giving people a fair chance to respond. And you should never take a source's word about important facts without verifying the truth. (There's a reason we call it reporting and not dictation.)

Most of all, I tell students, remember that you're writing about human beings, who are complicated creatures: The good guys are never all that good, and the bad guys usually aren't completely bad. People can be mistaken or deceitful, I tell young reporters, they frequently forget and often lie to themselves. That doesn't make a source useless, but it must make you extra careful.

Unfortunately, the early word from Rolling Stone is that they've absorbed none of these lessons. Publisher Jann Wenner has apparently decided not to fire, demote or discipline anybody at Rolling Stone, provoking expressions of disbelief among seasoned journalists.

"No one fired at Rolling Stone. Really?" wrote CNN media critic Brian Stelter.

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Joan Foster

I want to know the false accusers name. Is it Jackie Coakley? Why does she have the privilege of anonymity?
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Baldo
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Well I will enjoy the depositions in the lawsuit no matter how it turns out. Again it is tough to sue an Organization which buys ink by the ton as Cheshire said.

But then again Fraternities have Brotherhood and it reaches way back. I wouldn't be surprised to see some old members from that branch & others join in the legal fight as friends.

As for the legal matters that's for the higher paid help around here
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Joan Foster

http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2015/04/06/uva-frat-has-powerful-legal-case-against-rolling-stone/

On Monday, the University of Virginia’s Phi Kappa Psi fraternity announced it would investigate a lawsuit against Rolling Stone after the magazine’s massive “Rape on Campus” expose turned out to have been based completely on a fraudulent story. The fraternity released a statement regarding their potential lawsuit:

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 original 9,000-word article, widely praised by the mainstream media for its depth and reportage, accused seven men at the Phi Kappa Psi of allegedly raping a young woman named Jackie at a fraternity party, and further accused the university of ignoring the allegations. The author of the piece, Samantha Erdely, said she had an agenda: she wanted to uncover an example of the supposed rash of brutal rapes on campus. To that end, she told the story of Jackie without bothering to double check even the most basic facts. And the story she told was shocking in the extreme:

When yet another hand clamped over her mouth, Jackie bit it, and the hand became a fist that punched her in the face. “Grab its motherf*cking leg,” she heard a voice say. And that’s when Jackie knew she was going to be raped. She remembers every moment of the next three hours of agony, during which, she says, seven men took turns raping her, while two more – her date, Drew, and another man – gave instruction and encouragement.

The report drove UVA to suspend all fraternities on campus, ban Phi Kappa Psi, led to vandalism of the fraternity house complete with graffiti and shattered windows, and did severe damage to the national fraternity and its members.

The story itself, it turned out, was nonsense. Jackie lied. More importantly, Erdely didn’t engage in “basic, even routine journalistic practice” to check the story. Erdely offered this apology – but no apology to Phi Kappa Psi. She stated:

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.

She then explained that her big mistake was caring too much about alleged rape victims to check their stories, and said that she hoped her “mistakes in reporting this story do not silence the voices of victims that need to be heard.” She did not say anything about the voices of the innocent being protected.

Rolling Stone will not fire Erdely, managing editor Will Dana, or article editor Sean Woods.

UVA responded by pointing out the obvious:

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.

So, how likely is Phi Kappa Psi to win in a lawsuit against Rolling Stone?

Phi Kappa Psi would presumably file suit in Virginia, where the non-existent events supposedly took place. The definition of defamation in Virginia involves publication of an actionable statement with requisite fault on the part of the defendant. Each element of this definition requires further definition. “Actionable,” according to the Digital Media Law Project, means that the statement must be false and harm the plaintiff’s reputation. Virginia also recognizes the concept of defamation per se: defamation by the very nature of the claim. That category includes accusations of criminality that could result in indictment and punishment.

Phi Kappa Psi would, for purposes of defamation, be considered a public figure. That means that the fraternity would have to show not just negligence but malice. Malice is generally defined as reckless disregard for truth or knowledge that the statements were false. It would be difficult to claim that Erdely knew the statements were false – but when it comes to recklessness, it is difficult to imagine a more reckless story. The editors and writer of the story themselves are the sources for their reckless disregard of the truth. Here’s Woods:

Ultimately, we were too deferential to our rape victim; we honored too many of her requests in our reporting. We should have been much tougher, and in not doing that, we maybe did her a disservice.

Did her a disservice? What about those she slandered?

Then there’s Erdely herself:

If this story was going to be about Jackie, I can’t think of many things that we would have been able to do differently. … Maybe the discussion should not have been so much about how to accommodate her but should have been about whether she would be in this story at all.

The story, in other words, was too good to check. And so Erdely went out of her way not to check the story. When she finally asked Phi Kappa Psi for comment, according to the Columbia Journalism Review, she did so by cutting short the narration of the allegations:

She did not reveal Jackie’s account of the date of the attack. She did not reveal that Jackie said Phi Kappa Psi had hosted a “date function” that night, that prospective pledges were present or that the man who allegedly orchestrated the attack was a Phi Kappa Psi member who was also a lifeguard at the university aquatic center. Jackie had made no request that she refrain from providing such details to the fraternity.

The president of Phi Kappa Psi’s local chapter, Stephen Scipione, later said, “It was complete bullshit. They weren’t telling me what they were going to write about. They weren’t telling me any dates or details.”

The Columbia Journalism Review report, while overwhelmingly sympathetic to the emotional attraction felt by Erdely in reporting the false story, demonstrates conclusively that recklessness lay at the heart of the story. That will be difficult for Rolling Stone to disprove.

Ben Shapiro is Senior Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the new book, The People vs. Barack Obama: The Criminal Case Against The Obama Administration (Threshold Editions, June 10, 2014). He is also Editor-in-Chief of TruthRevolt.org. Follow Ben Shapiro on Twitter @benshapiro.
Edited by Joan Foster, Apr 6 2015, 06:14 PM.
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http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-04-06/rolling-stone-can-t-even-apologize-right


Rolling Stone Can't Even Apologize Right
316 Apr 6, 2015 3:59 PM EDT
By Megan McArdle

Rolling Stone got taken by a fabulist.

Sunday night, the Columbia Journalism Review released its exhaustive report on what went wrong with the magazine's blockbuster story about an alleged gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity that turned out to be substantially false. And we learned what Rolling Stone plans to do to prevent such mistakes in the future, which is to say basically nothing.

No one is getting fired. Jann Wenner, the magazine's owner, expects that Sabrina Rubin Erdely, the author of the article in question, will continue to write for them. Her apology, also released last night, says in part: "I allowed my concern for Jackie’s well-being, my fear of re-traumatizing her, and my confidence in her credibility to take the place of more questioning and more facts. These are mistakes I will not make again." So everyone is basically saying the same thing: Their compassion for rape victims allowed them to be taken by a liar. Big oops, won't do that again! Nothing to see here, so can we all move along?

It's not that this version is wrong -- I think at this point we can stop dancing around the fact that "Jackie" is a fabulist. The Rolling Stone report adds some detail to this, including the suggestion that the two additional alleged victims of gang rapes at Phi Kappa Psi were also creations of Jackie's imagination. But dealing with fabulists isn't some kind of rare hazard that journalists can't be expected to anticipate. People lie to journalists all the time, for fun and profit. They tell self-serving lies designed to get them out of trouble, or self-aggrandizing lies designed to puff themselves up. They tell lies of kindness to shield others from shame or worse, and lies designed to hurt people they hate. They also tell bizarre lies about things that bring them no benefit at all, for reasons that a psychologist might be able to explain but I cannot. And unfortunately, reporters get taken.

But while it is not wrong, it is also not enough. Usually, when a reporter gets taken, you will hear some combination of the following:

The reporter was young and inexperienced and found out the hard way that sources lie.
The reporter was under heavy deadline pressure that did not allow them to check what the source was saying.
The reporter had literally no way to verify what happened -- if someone tells you they were the sole survivor of a massacre in a region torn by civil war, who are you going to interview to check it out?

None of these applies to the Rolling Stone story. Erdely spent months working on it, and she delivered 400 pages of notes to Rolling Stone. It turns out that she was in my class at the University of Pennsylvania and has been working as a journalist for most of the time since, so it's safe to say that she's no naive spring chicken, unfamiliar with the wicked ways of sources. She had layers of editors and fact checkers who were aware of where she was getting her information. So what happened?

The following is what I gleaned from the report, some of it outright and some of it from inference.

1. It started with the subject matter. Rolling Stone's defense that it went wrong because it just cared too much about rape victims is wholly inadequate. But their feeling that they needed to tread lightly around rape victims is certainly part of the explanation. It doesn't seem to have seriously considered the possibility that the story could just be made up. Over and over, in the editorial decisions the magazine made, you can see that it was worried about getting sued but not about printing something that was false. Angry conservatives may paint this as some version of the "noble lie," but I really don't think that's what happened. I just think that it never occurred to anyone there. Why would someone make up such a horrible story?

But again, "Why would someone make that up?" is not an appropriate answer to your reporting deficiencies. People make up stories for no discernable reason at all -- I mean, why would you lie about having bought health insurance on the Obamacare exchanges? Yet someone did. After 20 years in the business, Erdely should have known this.

Moreover, Erdely's reporting suggests at least two reasons Jackie might have made it up: She first told her story to the school when she got in trouble for failing classes, and connecting with anti-rape groups on campus plugged Jackie into a social network that gave her a feeling of purpose and fellowship. Had Erdely tried harder to contact the friends whose behavior she maligned, she would have heard a third reason: Jackie had a crush, not returned, on one of the friends she called for help that night.

This core belief, which I doubt anyone at Rolling Stone ever consciously examined, blinded them to some major problems with the story: the fact that it was very cinematic, in a way that real stories rarely are, and that the whole thing effectively came from a single source. The subject matter also caused them to treat the story with excessive delicacy, lest they "re-traumatize" her. As I'll discuss below, I think this became an excuse for bad reporting. But I'm sure it also created a real reluctance to ask hard questions.

2. Confirmation bias. The CJR report talks a lot about confirmation bias, and I think that was at work. But I think that how it operated in this case is subtle.

Classic confirmation bias means that you ask questions that would confirm your theory, rather than ones that would disconfirm it. Say I give you a set of numbers in a set: 2, 4, 6, 8. Now, I say, tell me what the rules for inclusion in this set are. You can ask me a number, and I'll tell you whether it's in the set. Almost invariably, the next numbers people suggest are "10" and "12," and when you agree they're in the set, they proudly announce that the set is "even numbers."

False: The set is "all positive integers." Why did they fail? Because they only suggested numbers that would confirm their theory, which also happen to be in the set. What they didn't do is suggest an odd number to see if it might also qualify.

That's not a great account of what happened here: Erdely did ask for possibly disconfirming evidence, such as Jackie's work records. Where I think confirmation bias came in is that when Jackie provided these things, Erdely took them as positive proof, rather than a simple failure to disconfirm.

What do I mean? Jackie said she worked at the campus aquatic center. Erderly asked for, and got, her work records, which is good reporting. But what do those records show? They show that Jackie worked at the aquatic center. Working at the aquatic center is not evidence of rape.

Erdely checked a lot of details -- did Jackie talk to the university? Did she work at the aquatic center? Did other people notice her get depressed her freshman year? Now, as disconfirming evidence, some of these are potentially story-killing: If Jackie says she worked at the aquatic center and she didn't, then you start wondering what else she might be lying about. But as positive evidence, they tell you basically nothing. Nor does "she was depressed and not going to classes," a condition that afflicts a lot of freshmen who haven't been raped, including me 25 years ago. She took confirmation of side details as confirmation of the story, when it was not. And presumably, that made her more comfortable not confirming the core details of the rape, by talking to the witnesses: the perpetrators and the friends who saw Jackie after it happened. This should be a warning to all reporters: Piling up confirmations of marginal details can make you feel as if you're standing on a mountain of evidence, when in fact you're in a deep hole.

I suspect that confirmation bias also led Erdely to botch the one attempt she did make to get comment from the alleged perpetrators. This is the note she sent to the fraternity's chapter president: "'I’ve become aware of allegations of gang rape that have been made against the UVA chapter of Phi Kappa Psi,' Erdely wrote. 'Can you comment on those allegations?'" As the CJR review notes, this is extremely vague. Had she provided more detail, and perhaps made it clear that a lengthy account was going to be the centerpiece of her story, then Phi Kappa Psi could have provided a rebuttal and stopped the story in its tracks. But how do you rebut a vague accusation that a gang rape has occurred at your house at some point?

Erdely's question basically assumes what it wants to prove. If the story's true, then it is a pro forma elicitation of a pro forma denial, and there's nothing wrong with it. Of course, if the story isn't true, and you're asking questions of a 21-year-old college student who doesn't have a PR person on staff and doesn't know enough to elicit details so that he can rebut them specifically, then you've added another piece of non-evidence to your mountain.

3. Privacy laws and the norms of survivor support groups created the illusion of institutional verification. Erdely first heard the story from Emily Renda, a rape survivor and alumna who now works on the issue at UVA. Renda mentioned the alleged attack in congressional testimony. Erdely seems to have assumed in some way that this meant the university had confirmed the attack. This impression was heightened by various privacy laws, which make it virtually impossible for the university to discuss specific cases. Erdely was operating under the assumption that the university knew this had happened and was stonewalling. In fact, Renda had the same information Erdely did: the story she heard from Jackie. The university did not have enough information to take action, but it also could not discuss these details with Erdely. The lack of disconfirmation seems to have been taken as positive proof that it happened, rather than what it was: a legal prohibition on sharing information.

4. The fear of losing the story. This needs to be highlighted, because it is the only thing that explains some really inexplicable decisions.

Erdely's statement focuses on her fear of retraumatizing Jackie, something that also comes up in the CJR report. But something less salutary also appears: the fear of losing a really good story. These things seem to have sort of gotten blended together, so that when problems emerged with the reporting, everyone involved at Rolling Stone was able to convince themselves to go forward anyway on the grounds that Jackie is a trauma victim and it's dangerous to retraumatize her. Yet they don't seem to have been worried about retraumatizing her by running her story in a national magazine.

Because most of my readers are not journalists, it seems worth noting that if this story had not fallen apart, it likely would have walked away with a National Magazine Award. It checks all the boxes: important social issue, beautiful writing, a vivid and gruesome event at its core, a heart-rending miscarriage of justice. When Jackie threatened to slip away, she was threatening to torpedo Rolling Stone's major coup. There were certainly other stories that Erdely could have used instead, but less sensational stories that are more typical of campus rapes would not get the kind of readership or professional recognition that the magazine would earn for uncovering a clear-cut and horrific crime that the university had inexplicably failed to pursue.

I'm not saying Erdely and her editors were willing to print something false, or even something they suspected was possibly false, for professional advancement. There's no reason to think that this is the case, and there are many reasons not to. Printing a false story did not win Rolling Stone an award. It won it painful months of jeers from peers and the public alike. I can't say that no one would go ahead and take that risk, because Stephen Glass and Jack Kelley and others have done just that. But there's a reason that those people did what they did on their own and were fired when it was uncovered: 99.999 percent of journalists would quickly decide that this was a) wrong and b) professional suicide. One person might be amoral and crazy enough to try it, but good luck finding another person amoral and crazy enough to go along with you.

Rather, I think that because they assumed it was true, their primary fear was losing a major story, rather than getting taken by a fabulist. Losing a story is disappointing. But getting taken by a fabulist is shameful -- and potentially career-ending. I don't think that anyone ever made a conscious trade-off between these two things; rather, I think the operating assumption that Jackie was telling the truth was so strong that they started thinking of talking to the other side as an annoying procedural step to elicit a pro-forma comment, rather than an important part of the reporting process. The same extraordinary features that made this story so potent also made it unlikely that anyone was going to be able to offer a convincing defense; you can claim that a one-on-one date rape was actually consensual, but that's not a plausible explanation for a gang rape that took place on top of a bed of broken glass. So if you start by assuming the story is true, you also assume that you're not going to get much worth printing from the perpetrators.

Too, by the time the magazine started making the really bad decisions, Erdely was also well into the story-writing process. Erdely did what a lot of journalists do: She handed her editors an early draft while she was still reporting. There's nothing wrong with this -- for one thing, you may want to know approximately what you're putting in the story before you offer sources a chance to respond, rather than spend a lot of time eliciting comments from people you're not going to mention. But it meant that by the time they were really grappling with their ability to contact the main witnesses, immense amounts of time and labor had already been invested in Jackie's story. And as we know from many, many human endeavors, people have a very hard time cutting their losses when they have already invested a lot in something. They're more likely to double down in an attempt to salvage their investment.

And double down they did. The single most inexplicable decision made by Erdely and her editors was to paper over the reporting gaps by using pseudonyms for the rapist who was known to Jackie -- "Drew" -- and the three friends she called after the alleged attack. This is seriously disordered thinking on everyone's part. I'm not entirely opposed to the use of pseudonyms, but they should be used sparingly, and only in cases in which you're trying to protect people who are taking serious risks in giving you information.

None of the friends had given Rolling Stone information at great personal risk. And one certainly hopes that they were not trying to protect Drew from the consequences of his actions. So why give him a pseudonym? It serves only two purposes: to conceal the fact that Rolling Stone does not know his name, and to protect Rolling Stone from being sued. Using pseudonyms for either of these purposes seems wildly inappropriate.

Both the magazine and the reporter further blurred the reporting gaps by writing the story in a way that suggested Erdely had tried to contact friends when she hadn't, and apparently didn't even know their full names; Erdely did note that she didn't know who Drew was in one draft, but her editor removed the caveat. After the story came out, they muddied the waters even more by answering direct questions from other reporters with what you might call "nonresponsive responses." When asked about her attempts to contact the perpetrators of this particular attack, Erdely talked about what she had done to contact the fraternity; Sean Woods, her editor, told Paul Farhi of the Washington Post that "we verified their existence [by talking to Jackie's friends]. ... I’m satisfied that these guys exist and are real. We knew who they were.” If they thought they had done all the reporting they needed to, why did they then obscure what they had done?

What I see when I read through the CJR report is the story of journalists who had an incredible story, one that would get them readers and professional acclaim, and, perhaps most important, give them the opportunity to right a great wrong. Their excitement about the story, their determination to tell it, blinded them to the problems, so that the old joke about a story being "too good to check" actually came true, with terrible consequences. And that should be a lesson to every journalist out there: The better your story, the harder you need to work to disconfirm it. Because the odds are, your brain is sending you all the wrong signals.

Of course, it's not exactly news that our emotions can mislead us. That's why we have professional rules, such as "always contact the other side for comment," in the first place. Rolling Stone got taken by a fabulist. But it was not the victim of fraud; it was a co-conspirator in self-deception.

To contact the author on this story:
Megan McArdle at mmcardle3@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor on this story:
Brooke Sample at bsample1@bloomberg.net
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Mason
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Parts unknown
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Greta's legal "expert": Just because the Police didn't find anything, doesn't mean nothing happened to her!

There they go again - just because all Evidence says something else - she may have been Raped!


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Edited by Mason, Apr 6 2015, 06:50 PM.
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MikeZPU

Quote:
 
The story, in other words, was too good to check. And so Erdely went out of her way not to check the story. When she finally asked Phi Kappa Psi for comment, according to the Columbia Journalism Review, she did so by cutting short the narration of the allegations:

She did not reveal Jackie’s account of the date of the attack. She did not reveal that Jackie said Phi Kappa Psi had hosted a “date function” that night, that prospective pledges were present or that the man who allegedly orchestrated the attack was a Phi Kappa Psi member who was also a lifeguard at the university aquatic center. Jackie had made no request that she refrain from providing such details to the fraternity.

The president of Phi Kappa Psi’s local chapter, Stephen Scipione, later said, “It was complete bullshit. They weren’t telling me what they were going to write about. They weren’t telling me any dates or details.”


This is NOT an inept lapse of the "journalistic method." This is
deliberate circumvention of good-faith fact-finding. Erdely absolutely
did not want to learn anything that might detract from her beloved story.

Again, it was deliberate. Erdeley knew what she was doing.

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Joan Foster

Then I guess it's just as fair, by THEIR standards, to say that though we can't find the proof, doesn't mean Obama was not born in Kenya.

And it's fair to say that the the Clintons had something to do with Vince Fosters death.
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Mason
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Joan Foster
Apr 6 2015, 05:31 PM
I want to know the false accusers name. Is it Jackie Coakley? Why does she have the privilege of anonymity?
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Activist promoting the story Frequents the Obama White House:

http://dailycaller.com/2014/12/22/activist-that-introduced-uvas-jackie-to-rolling-stone-made-numerous-white-house-visits/


I don't know about the source of her real name. They've put out bad information before.


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.


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Edited by Mason, Apr 6 2015, 07:03 PM.
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MikeZPU

http://newsbusters7.s3.amazonaws.com/images/2014-11-24-MSNBC-MJ-Erdely.jpg

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Mason
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Joan Foster
Apr 6 2015, 06:55 PM
Then I guess it's just as fair, by THEIR standards, to say that though we can't find the proof, doesn't mean Obama was not born in Kenya.

And it's fair to say that the the Clintons had something to do with Vince Fosters death.
.

Excellent!


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