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UVA Rape Story Collapses; Duke Lacrosse Redux
Topic Started: Dec 5 2014, 01:45 PM (60,438 Views)
MikeZPU

Well before this story was widely discredited, I went to read it on-line.

When I was about 10 short paragraphs into the story, I walked into
the room where my wife was on the computer, and I said to her:
"I guarantee you that this story (Jackie's story) is a load of crap."

Now, maybe because of our experience with Mangum, we have a
better detector for a "fantastic set of lies," but I was 100% certain
that Jackie's story was made up.

I was certain that Jackie was a pathological liar.

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Gotnews.com has obtained the rape obsessed Pinterest account of the 20-year-old girl at the center of the University of Virginia rape hoax.

We can also confirm that Jackie Coakley has misled other students at both her high school and her college about her past sexual relations with men.

Coakley’s social media postings (below) reveal a woman obsessed with rape and well aware of the political consequences of rape allegations.

Edited by MikeZPU, Apr 6 2015, 08:34 PM.
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Joan Foster

Once Mangum's Hoax was debunked, her name was revealed. Her picture was on the front page of the NYPost.."The Duke Liar."

It's time we knew who "Jackie" is as well.
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http://newsbusters.org/blogs/clay-waters/2015/04/06/nyts-rolling-stone-hoax-coverage-ignores-own-complicity-previous-rape

NYT's Rolling Stone Hoax Coverage Ignores Own Complicity in Previous Rape Hoax Involving Duke

April 6, 2015 | 11:35 PM EDT

New York Times reporter
Jonathan Mahler on Monday covered the final damning discrediting of Rolling Stone magazine's story of a gang rape at the University of Virginia: "In Report on Rolling Stone, a Case Study in Failed Journalism." But Mahler skipped his own paper's disgraceful coverage of a previous campus rape hoax -- involving the Duke lacrosse team in 2006.

(snip)

Mahler gave a potted history of recent media misdeeds:

The first two are straightforward. There is pure fabrication, for which high-profile culprits include Jayson Blair (The New York Times), Stephen Glass (The New Republic) and, going back a little further, Janet Cooke (The Washington Post). And there is the act of plagiarism (culprits too numerous to list).

“A Rape on Campus” falls into a third category: lack of skepticism.

While Mahler mentioned his paper's own appalling fabrication/plagiarism scandal (Jayson Blair), he also dug into the paper's "at-times credulous coverage of Saddam Hussein’s supposed cache of chemical and biological weapons in the run-up to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003," as if that was a comparable scandal (it helps if you're an anti-Bush leftie).

“As an editor, it’s the one that really leaves you feeling you’ve failed at your job,” said Bill Keller, former executive editor of The Times and now editor in chief of the Marshall Project. “The job of editors is to be the last line of defense against reporters who get carried away by an unreliable source, or stampeded by their zeal to break a big story, or who fall for a pat narrative.”

It is a subject Mr. Keller knows well, having presided over The Times’s internal investigation of the paper’s at-times credulous coverage of Saddam Hussein’s supposed cache of chemical and biological weapons in the run-up to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. In both that case and “A Rape on Campus,” an institution’s better judgment was overwhelmed by its hunger for scoops.

And Mahler himself committed the journalistic sin of bias by omission:

A closer parallel to the Rolling Stone article may be much of the media’s breathless coverage of members of the Duke University lacrosse team who were accused of gang-raping a woman in 2006. Like “A Rape on Campus,” it was a story that seemed to conform to a lot of the public’s worst ideas about the behavior of privileged young men at elite colleges.

“It was too good to not be true, and that’s what’s going on in this case as well,” said Daniel Okrent, a former public editor at The Times. “You don’t want women to be gang-raped in a fraternity house, but you want to believe this terrible thing is happening and therefore you can expose it.”

Mahler totally skipped the Times own pathetic Duke lacrosse coverage, the most friendly to the rogue prosecution of any news outlet. Okrent himself, the paper's former public editor, told the Duke University student newspaper in the aftermath of the hoax that "I think The Times' coverage was heartbreaking. I understand why they jumped on the story when they did, but it showed everything that's wrong with American journalism.'"

As the Media Research Center has previously documented, the Times shamefully played prosecutor with the racially charged rape hoax at Duke University in 2006. The paper notoriously slimed three innocent Duke lacrosse players, falsely accused by stripper Crystal Mangum of rape at a house party. The allegations were shown to be completely false, and Nifong was later disbarred for fraud and misconduct.

The most notorious story was Duff Wilson and co-author Jonathan Glater's 5,600-word front-page summary of the case on August 25, 2006, a story so slanted it was fricasseed by law-writer Stuart Taylor Jr. in Slate four days later. The subhead to Taylor's rebuttal reads "The New York Times Is Still Victimizing Innocent Dukies." A 2007 book, "Until Proven Innocent -- Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case," by Taylor & KC Johnson, ripped apart the Times' shoddy coverage of the case, taking particular aim at Wilson and Roberts
.

Mahler did unwittingly put his finger on how liberal reporters generate bad liberal reporting – it's soul-satisfying to stick up for a perceived victim or underdog against a powerful villain. In the liberal world view, that dichotomy conveniently breaks down neatly into Democratic victims and Republican villains.

Journalists are often driven to cover atrocities and personal traumas by the best intentions, chiefly the desire to right wrongs and shed light on injustice -- in a word, empathy. It is a noble impulse that animates a lot of important and courageous reporting. But empathy can also be a source of vulnerability for journalists, lowering their defenses against bad information.


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http://www.cotwa.info/2015/04/weve-learned-nothing-from-rolling-stone.html

Monday, April 6, 2015

The Rolling Stone rush to judgment wasn't "isolated and unusual," it was business as usual in our culture

The Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism issued a scathing report Sunday on the editorial breakdown at Rolling Stone magazine that allowed publication of a story about a purported gang rape to a woman named "Jackie" at the University of Virginia that never really happened. The magazine said it considers the whole affair "an isolated and unusual episode."

And once again, we've learned nothing from yet another in a long line of high profile rape accusations that imploded under the weight of its own prevarications. The fact that "Jackie's" outlandish rape tale was so readily believed by the article's author, by Rolling Stone's editors, and by vast segments of the American public wasn't "an isolated and unusual" phenomenon. It was business as usual in our culture.

The real lesson of the UVA "gang rape" that never really happened isn't about Sabrina Erdely, Rolling Stone or its lax editors. It isn't about reporters who take liberties with the facts, and it's not about "editorial breakdowns." It isn't about "expert fabulist storytellers" who tell rape lies and who seem like credible people. Those are pieces in a much larger puzzle.

The real lesson of the "gang rape" at UVA that never really happened is about a culture happy to reduce an entire gender to vile caricature any time an allegation of a sex offense is made. It's about a culture that happily rushes to judgment and assumes that men and boys accused of sex offenses are guilty by reason of penis without considering even the possibility that it may not have happened. It's about a culture where keeping an open mind about a rape allegation is deemed "victim blaming" and "rape culture."

Read this and you'll understand where the Rolling Stone article came from--you can see example after example of the twisted mentality that led that article to be written and believed every day of the week in newspapers, magazines, and on popular websites.

The sneering mob at the hanging trees of the Old South never really left us. They became the sneering mob quick to believe Ruby Bates and Victoria Price, Tawana Brawley, Crystal Gail Mangum, Wanetta Gibson, Danmell Ndonye, and too many others to chronicle. Sometimes, as at Duke University, the sneering mob gussies itself up with PhDs and tenure and assumes guilt because the accused penises are attached to white, "privileged" lacrosse players. The sneering mob rationalizes its rush to judgment by citing wildly inflated statistics and pointing to other, unrelated cases and insisting that it happened there so it must have happened here.

It's too easy to cluck our tongues and tsk-tsk Sabrina Erdely and Rolling Stone and pretend what they did was "isolated and unusual." The real lesson of the Rolling Stone debacle is that it's not. It's business as usual.

Posted by COTWA at 3:34 PM
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http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2015/04/06/rolling-stone-report-rape-editorials-debates/25386451/

Rolling Stone's report leaves trail of damage: Our view
The Editorial Board, 9:24 p.m. EDT April 6, 2015

Journalists know that a juicy tip often falls apart once they begin digging into the facts. That possibility has given rise to a cynical saying about a story that's "too good to check."

The point is that the more sensational the allegation, the more scrupulously it needs to be investigated. And if the original tip doesn't survive scrutiny, so be it.

Scrupulous investigation is precisely what Rolling Stone failed to do when it heard about "Jackie," an alleged victim of a fraternity gang rape at the University of Virginia. Now its story, published last November, has collapsed, leaving a trail of damage that stretches from the magazine's reputation to the credibility of sexual assault victims to basic standards of due process.

OTHER VIEWS: My responsibility was to get it right

Start with Rolling Stone. A scathing independent report, published Sunday by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and discussed at a Monday news conference, makes clear that writer Sabrina Rubin Erdely and her editors ignored basic rules of reporting after finding in "Jackie" what looked like the perfect illustration of campus rape and an elite university that ignored it.

Neither the reporter nor the magazine's editors pushed hard enough to test the truth of that story, even though the red flags were so evident that other journalists were poking gaping holes in it within days of publication. As the Columbia report put it, this was a "journalistic failure that was avoidable."

The magazine allowed Jackie to remain unidentified, then failed to seek corroboration from other sources. The reporter did not interview any of three friends Jackie said she'd confided in hours after the alleged rape — a path if pursued that would have raised deep questions about the story. Nor did the reporter confront fraternity officials with specific accusations, giving them a fair chance to respond and perhaps raise doubts about the piece. Given these lapses, it's puzzling that Rolling Stone has so far declined to sanction those involved.

The damage here extends well beyond journalistic credibility. Because date rape is often a he-said/she-said allegation, false or exaggerated accounts make it harder for victims to be believed.

That's regrettable, because broader evidence suggests such accounts are relatively rare. A study by social scientists at a university in the Northeast found that just 6% of 136 rape allegations over 10 years turned out to be false. Other studies put false reports at anywhere from 2% to 10% — which means that more than 90% of allegations are true.

Regardless of the statistics, the accused are entitled to a presumption of innocence. Yet the University of Virginia reacted to the magazine story by temporarily suspending activities at all fraternities and sororities. The fraternity at the center of the piece, Phi Kappa Psi, was given virtually no chance to defend itself. Collective punishment and a guilty-until-proven-innocent approach are no ways to make up for past failures to take rape allegations seriously.

If there is an overriding lesson to be learned from this debacle, and a similar case several years ago involving members of the Duke lacrosse team, it is that everyone — from journalists to advocates to administrators — should avoid a rush to judgment based on preconceived notions.

USA TODAY's editorial opinions are decided by its Editorial Board, separate from the news staff. Most editorials are coupled with an opposing view — a unique USA TODAY feature.
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http://spectator.org/articles/62325/rolling-over-truth

Rolling Over the Truth

Liberaldom’s post-’60s Man the Ravager stereotype is Rolling Stone’s ruination.

By William Murchison – 4.7.15

We learn, from a squint-eyed investigation by major functionaries at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, that Rolling Stone magazine’s bulging-eyed, 9,000-word article, “A Rape on Campus,” doesn’t wash. A “journalistic failure that was avoidable,” the investigators called the article, which purported to tell of a 2012 gang rape at the University of Virginia, involving fraternity members and a female student.

Except, apparently, it didn’t happen: or anyway not nearly the way the complainant told the magazine, which with minimal investigation bought her story hook, line, and sinker, and commenced to spread it abroad. Guilty as charged, was Rolling Stone’s message.

A bunch of Paleolithic types — members (wouldn’t you know it?) of UVa’s Phi Kappa Psi fraternity chapter, had outraged an innocent student who was at last telling her story. Her unverifiable story, it turned out: a story the magazine ought never to have swallowed without careful scrutiny, in the traditional of investigative journalism. The investigating team found that hardly any scrutiny occurred. And Rolling Stone’s ownership acknowledged that, true, the thing hadn’t been very well done, and “we never sort of allowed for the fact that maybe the story we were being told was not true...” etc.

We just “sort of” bought the story the way it came to us; just assumed it was likely true!

What a glorious description of the present cultural moment in our fair land. If you’re a college man and, worse, a white frat member, destined for Wall Street or some such culturally deficient place, you’re under immediate suspicion. You probably regard women as playthings. You’d as soon rape one as not. You probably dislike blacks and all them furriners, too. Bet you vote (ugh) Republican!

Well — Rolling Stone, as representative of the elite establishment that now decides what we can believe and say in 21st-century America, certainly has your number.

Among our modern shibboleths — a gift from the high priesthood of the media — is the notion of a “rape culture” — “the concept,” as Wikipedia puts it, “that rape was common and normal in American culture, and that it is one extreme manifestation of pervasive societal misogyny and sexism.”

The ’60s set us up for this addition to the list of social evils, such as government-enforced racial segregation. Man the Protector became Man the Ravager — a narrative that liberal males mostly accept in order to maintain their cultural credibility and social status.

The Man the Ravager stereotype has by now so embedded itself in general consciousness that to hear an accusation against the enemy is to swallow it. Which isn’t so good for honest journalism, we find out. It’s terrible for freedom of speech, what with universities on the lookout for random remarks, in the classroom and on campus, that might make hearers (according to one definition) “uncomfortable, unwelcome or unsafe on account of biology, sex, race, ethnicity, sexual credentials” — and so on and so on.

The lack of common moral and cultural assumptions among us has never been more evident than in the 21st century. This was likely because the assumption rarely arose previously that your ordinary frat member (to revert to the topic at hand) was a rapist just waiting to spring.

Mistrust and injustice are among the fruits of this suspicion we seem doomed to live with for so long as, say, there are journalists who never sort of allow for the fact that maybe the story being spun for their benefit isn’t true.

Formerly a common sense of right and wrong, based on scriptural teaching and the natural law, minimized the dangers that people with conflicting ideals — or different sexes — posed to each other. The ’60s, with their culture of personal liberation, pretty well broke down the old ideals and routed their enforcers — parents, college deans and presidents, ministers of religion; leaving the staff of Rolling Stone to enforce orthodoxy and good behavior on grounds all their own.

Nice try, folks. Can’t wait for the next issue.
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'Rolling Stone should be held accountable': Friend of supposed UVA rape victim smeared by discredited story says magazine should have fired reporter

Magazine published A Rape on Campus in November 2014 issue
Graphically recounted supposed gang-rape of University of Virginia student
Sabrina Rubin Erdely wrote article based on interviews with victim 'Jackie'
Did not speak to Alex Stock or Ryan Duffin, who were portrayed poorly
They could have revealed Jackie's unreliability before story went to press
Duffin today took the magazine to task and said its reputation is shot

By Kieran Corcoran For Dailymail.com

Published: 23:18 EST, 6 April 2015 | Updated: 03:52 EST, 7 April 2015

A University of Virginia student whose reputation was trashed by Rolling Stone's discredited tale of a violent gang rape on campus has taken the magazine to task for not firing anybody after its story fell apart.

Alex Stock, a former friend of supposed victim 'Jackie', spoke out after he featured in the now-infamous feature A Rape on Campus, and was painted as a callous social climber who discouraged a rape victim from speaking out.

'I think the Rolling Stone absolutely should be held accountable', he said in a TV interview Monday, and added the under-fire magazine has risked its reputation by not disciplining Sabrina Erdley, the reporter who wrote the story.

Rolling Stone's reporting was torn apart by professors from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, who pointed out 'basic, even routine' failures in how the story was prepared.

The most important failing, they said, was not contacting Stock and another student, Ryan Duffin, who spoke out alongside Stock in an interview with Fox News's Megyn Kelly.

Stock and Duffin - who were referred to by pseudonyms in the story - would have been able to tell Erdley that there were serious inconsistencies between what Jackie had told them and the story the article credulously repeated.

Rolling Stone's story said that Jackie, sitting in a dress stained in blood from a gang rape by seven different men just hours before, sobbed to her three friends, who told her to take it no further.

The story said the three - Duffin, Stock and an unnamed woman - were preoccupied with the 'social price' of being associated with rape accusations. Duffin and Stock were painted as wannabe frat boys whose prospects of acceptance would be harmed.

In fact, they revealed, Jackie had no blood on her or obvious wounds - and the friends immediately suggested going to the police, which Jackie said she was not prepared for.

None of them was ever contacted by Erdley - in Duffin's case because Jackie had falsely told her that he had refused to contribute.

When asked whether Jackie herself should have her identity revealed, Stock said: 'I don't see any point in further shaming her. Nobody can track her down, I've even spoken with some friends from her home town - nobody knows where she is.

'I think she's learned her lesson. I think the Rolling Stone absolutely should be held accountable.'

When asked whether Erdley should be fired, he said: 'I think the Rolling Stone puts its reputation seriously at stake for not doing that.

'I think the next article she comes out with it's going to be hard for people to take seriously.'

Responding to the same question, Duffin said: 'I think much more than anybody losing jobs or not losing jobs I think it's important that Rolling Stone and other media outlets look at this more as a story of what not to do in reporting.'

Many were sceptical when Rolling Stone responded to the damning review Sunday night by standing by Erdley, her editors and her fact-checkers despite the avoidable problems their story had caused.

Jann Wenner, the publisher of Rolling Stone, confirmed to the New York Times that everybody would remain in their positions.

He defended Erdley's reporting, and described Jackie as 'a really expert fabulist storyteller'.

Erdely, who went to ground as the row over her article erupted, issued an apology in the wake of the review, admitting 'I did not go far enough'.

Her piece credulously recounted Jackie's tale the story of an anonymous student - referred to as Jackie - who said she was lured to the Phi Kappa Psi house and raped by a gang of seven men.

It described the ordeal, during which Jackie said she was passed from man to man in an excruciating three hours of pain, during which she was also supposedly penetrated with a beer bottle upstairs during a pledging event.

The article recounted the event in vivid, graphic detail based on Jackie's account.

It said: 'There was a heavy person on top of her, spreading open her thighs, and another person kneeling on her hair, hands pinning down her arms, sharp shards digging into her back, and excited male voices rising all around her.

'When yet another hand clamped over her mouth, Jackie bit it, and the hand became a fist that punched her in the face. The men surrounding her began to laugh.

Describing the moment she supposedly passed out from pain, it continued: 'Someone handed her classmate a beer bottle. Jackie stared at the young man, silently begging him not to go through with it.

'And as he shoved the bottle into her, Jackie fell into a stupor, mentally untethering from the brutal tableau, her mind leaving behind the bleeding body under assault on the floor.'

The review spelled out extensive contact between Erdely and Jackie, spanning eight interviews. Erdely wrote 405 pages of notes about the story. Jackie also spent four hours speaking to a Rolling Stone fact-checker.

Erdely had asked repeatedly for the name of the supposed attacker, but Jackie said she was not 'comfortable' with the idea of him being contacted for the story.

But they ultimately decided to rely on her for virtually all the information in the account, which led to inconsistencies not being discovered until after publication.

Erdely asked Jackie again for the name once the public interrogation of her account began. This time she agreed - but it emerged she did not even know how to spell the surname of the man, referred to as 'Drew' in the story.

Experts at Columbia concluded that Erdely, her editors, and the fact-checking department all failed to try hard enough to speak to the accused, and other people mentioned in the story.

Another possible way Erdely could have found out inconsistencies in the story would have been giving fuller details to the fraternity and UVA when asking them for comment, the review said.

Stepehn Scipione, the chapter president of Phi Kappa, was asked to comment on the allegations without being given dates of the supposed attack or any details about who was involved.

He told the review: 'It was complete bull***t. They weren't telling me what they were going to write about. They weren't telling me any dates or details.'

When the full story was published, Phi Kappa Psi responded by pointing out there had been no party on the date Jackie gave. They also said that - despite claims of a pledging ritual taking place at the time - the fraternity house was then home to no pledges.

The review concluded: 'Rolling Stone's repudiation of the main narrative in A Rape on Campus is a story of journalistic failure that was avoidable.

'The failure encompassed reporting, editing, editorial supervision and fact-checking.

'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.

'The published story glossed over the gaps in the magazine's reporting by using pseudonyms and by failing to state where important information had come from.'

It recommended that Rolling Stone tighten its procedures around fact-checking and offer more details when requesting comment from subjects. It also questioned the use of pseudonyms, and said the magazine should consider banning them.

At the same time as publishing the review, Rolling Stone announced that it was 'officially retracting' the story, which has amassed more than 2.7million views online.

The page where the story was hosted until Sunday night now redirected to the Columbia review, which has the subtitle 'An anatomy of a journalistic failure'.

Sean Woods, one of Jackie's editors, described the scandal over the article as 'It's been an extraordinarily painful and humbling experience'.

He later added: '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.'

In a personal statement released online, Erdely said: 'Reading the Columbia account of the mistakes and misjudgments in my reporting was a brutal and humbling experience.

'I want to offer my deepest apologies: to Rolling Stone's 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.

She said that as a reporter she must: 'weigh my compassion against my journalistic duty to find the truth.

'However, in the case of Jackie and her account of her traumatic rape, I did not go far enough to verify her story.

'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.'



Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3028348/Rolling-Stone-held-accountable-Friend-supposed-UVA-rape-victim-smeared-trashed-story-says-magazine-killed-credibility-not-firing-anyone.html#ixzz3Wc0vX8zL
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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/07/business/media/university-of-virginia-fraternity-to-go-after-rolling-stone-for-rape-article.html?_r=0

University of Virginia Fraternity to Go After Rolling Stone for Rape Article

By RAVI SOMAIYAAPRIL 6, 2015

The University of Virginia fraternity at the center of a retracted article by Rolling Stone magazine that detailed a purported gang rape by its members said on Monday that it planned “to pursue all available legal action against the magazine.”

The fraternity, Phi Kappa Psi, issued a statement after the release of a damning report that the magazine commissioned from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, which described how Rolling Stone’s journalistic process failed at every step before the article’s publication last November.

Despite the public criticism of the article, and its retraction, legal experts said the path to a successful defamation lawsuit by the fraternity was not straightforward.

The report, which was released Sunday night, “demonstrates the reckless nature in which Rolling Stone researched and failed to verify facts in its article that erroneously accused Phi Kappa Psi of crimes its members did not commit,” Stephen Scipione, the president of the Virginia chapter, said in the statement. The fraternity has retained a lawyer, but has not yet taken any formal action, a spokesman said.

The fraternity would have to allow a public examination of its social activities, said Charles D. Tobin, who heads the national media practice for the law firm Holland & Knight, which might include potentially embarrassing details from parties it has held. It would also be required to show that the claims made in the article were “of and concerning it” as an entity. And if the fraternity was deemed legally to be a public entity instead of a private one, as legal experts said was likely, Mr. Tobin said it would have to “establish actual malice — not that Rolling Stone committed bad journalism but that it knowingly committed a falsehood.”

Mr. Tobin said, “It would be colossally difficult for them to make a successful claim.”

Rolling Stone declined to comment on any potential legal action against the magazine.

After the report and article’s retraction, Rolling Stone was criticized by the University of Virginia and by the governor and the attorney general of the state. On social media, some railed against the decision to allow the article’s author, Sabrina Rubin Erdely; its editor, Sean Woods; and Rolling Stone’s managing editor, Will Dana, to keep their jobs. (Ms. Erdely is working on another article for the magazine, according to a person with knowledge of the assignment, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.)

Others questioned statements that Jann Wenner, the magazine’s publisher and one of its co-founders, made to The New York Times that the failings of the article represented an isolated incident, and that part of the fault lay with its source, a woman identified only as Jackie.

On Monday, at a news conference to discuss the report, two of its authors, Steve Coll, the Columbia journalism school’s dean, and Sheila Coronel, the dean of academic affairs, noted that Rolling Stone had itself commissioned the report, in part as an attempt to allow others to learn from its mistakes. But they also rejected the notion that Jackie was to blame for the article’s issues. The magazine’s reporting was at fault, they said, and they stood by their recommendations for more robust newsroom practices.

“This failure was not the subject’s or the source’s fault,” Mr. Coll said. “It was the product of failed methodology.”

Ms. Erdely broke down when describing to them the moment she realized that Jackie might not be reliable, they said. They declined to comment on whether any of those involved with the article should have lost their jobs. “We pointed out systemic and institutional problems,” Ms. Coronel said. “We leave it up to Rolling Stone to decide how best to deal with these problems.”

The article, titled “A Rape on Campus,” was based on Jackie’s account of being raped by seven men at a fraternity event, and the resistance she met when trying to get justice for herself. It initially stoked a national debate on sexual assaults on campus, but was quickly called into question by The Washington Post and the fraternity itself. Last month, the police in Charlottesville, Va., said they had “exhausted all investigative leads” and found “no substantive basis” to support the article’s description of the assault.

The Columbia report, written by Ms. Coronel and Mr. Coll, with Derek Kravitz, a postgraduate research scholar, criticized the process behind the article. The magazine did not engage in “basic, even routine journalistic practice,” it said, specifying that it had not corroborated Jackie’s account with the friends quoted in the article using pseudonyms; had not adequately sought to identify the man who Jackie said led those who raped her, also identified by a pseudonym; and had not given the fraternity adequate information to respond before publication.

At the news conference, Mr. Coll said that he and Ms. Coronel were concerned that the failings of the article, and the fallout from it, including their report, might discourage others from reporting on the vital issue of campus sexual assault. “It would be a really unfortunate outcome if journalists backed away from doing this kind of reporting as a result of this highly visible failure,” he said. “Because this is important work, and it’s hard work.”
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Joan Foster

Love the quote by Samuel Butler...sounds like something our very wise friend Abb would say.

"The official post-mortems of rotten stories—as inevitable and necessary as they are—nourish another set of existing biases. (If you have a spare weekend, I invite you to read the 234-page independent report on Rathergate.) Typically, a few culpable parties are fired, retired or otherwise chased off in the wake of a post-mortem, but such purges are mostly symbolic and only punctuate the interval between transgressions. Wherever work is done—in the laboratory, in the halls of justice, in restaurant kitchens, on the operating table, in newsrooms—some people will always violate the social contract or cut corners. The press can commission as many pages of forensic reports as they wish, but they’ll never reform the incorrigible and the lazy. (It goes without saying that the same goes for other waywarding professions.)


“The most important service rendered by the press and the magazines is that of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust,” wrote Samuel Butler.

Only the sentimental believe in teachable moments. For the rest of us there is only disaster recovery.


Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/04/rolling-stone-rape-columbia-report-116714.html#ixzz3WcgfD4ui
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Joan Foster

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/12/everything-we-know-uva-rape-case.html

Not sure if this has been posted before...but it's an excellent summary.
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Joan Foster

Comment at another site:

Jackie's story was always completely preposterous. Nine teenage boys who just finished taking the SAT and a slew of AP classes arrive at UVA and within two weeks they have made a pact to punch, gang rape, and brutally beat a classmate in front of each other? And Emily Renda heard this story and not only believed it, but testified in front of the US Senate about it without telling a single member of law enforcement? Jackie and her friend Emily Renda have caused irreparable damage to UVA's global reputation. Though they may tell themselves they are advocates for rape victims, in reality they have each used unreported rape stories to get attention for themselves, or in Renda's case to get a job for herself. Rape is a violent, awful crime. It is not a social cause or a hobby that requires Facebook pages and campus clubs.
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A question for the lawyers - since the fraternity is planning to sue, could they call "Jackie" as a witness?
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Quasimodo

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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/416530/fighting-against-rape-culture-means-never-having-say-youre-sorry-charles-c-w-cooke

Fighting Against ‘Rape Culture’ Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry

April 6

(snip)

Ultimately, it is downright impossible to divorce Erdely’s conduct from the cultural pathologies that informed it. At UVA, at Rolling Stone, and within the media in general, the malleable specter of “rape culture” is prompting good people to behave like fools. Over the last decade or so, we have witnessed the rise of a political movement that hopes to set the investigation and punishment of sexual assault outside of the limitations that are imposed by respect for due process, for rational inquiry, and for common intellectual decency.

By and large, this movement is populated by people who despise the truth if it contradicts the narrative; who regard evidence and process as tools of oppression; who interpret skepticism and questioning as acts of hostility; and who, at least as it relates to “rape culture,” consider unthinking credulity as a virtue and not a vice.

Think back, if you dare, to the first few weeks of the scandal – more specifically, to the point at which a handful of skeptics began to ask penetrating questions about Sabrina Erdely’s account — and ask yourself what happened to the dissenters. Were they thanked for their contributions, or were they screamed at, mercilessly? The answer, sadly, is the latter.

(snip)

Even her apology — such as it was — followed a classic path: To wit, “I’m sorry for getting the details wrong, but I hope you won’t think this means it wasn’t true.” Taking up this lattermost point, the lawyer Scott Greenfield observed today that Erdely has “not only failed to apologize to those she wrongfully smeared in her story, but used it as a vehicle to further promote the very cause that blinded her from truth.”

He is correct. Indeed, the most notable feature of this whole saga has been the “rape apology” crowd’s spectacular unwillingness to recognize that there were two potentially bad outcomes here, not just one. It would, of course, have been terrible if Jackie’s story were true but nobody believed her. But it would also have been awful if the charges were untrue and the alleged perpetrators had been unfairly maligned.

That it never crossed the minds of the howling mob that their targets may in fact be innocent — and, indeed, that Sabrina Erdely cannot bring herself to apologize to those whose lives she has damaged — is perhaps the most worrying, and illiberal, thing of all.

And so the real casualties are forgotten,
and the authors of their misery will live to see another day. Were I among those who were libeled here, I could be forgiven for thinking that I were invisible; for lamenting that the apologies have been half-hearted and half-meant; for observing that the contrition has been hollow and pro-forma; and for concluding that all of these things are true because the real mourning is being done in the name of the smash-hit story that never was, and not in the interests of those who were hurt by its excesses.

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Quasimodo

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And so the real casualties are forgotten, and the authors of their misery will live to see another day. Were I among those who were libeled here, I could be forgiven for thinking that I were invisible; for lamenting that the apologies have been half-hearted and half-meant; for observing that the contrition has been hollow and pro-forma; and for concluding that all of these things are true because the real mourning is being done in the name of the smash-hit story that never was, and not in the interests of those who were hurt by its excesses.


Applicable to Duke, also (as, when Brodhead couldn't even mention the names of the falsely-accused, for months)...




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Foxlair45
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I have to tell y'all: my liberal sister has come unhinged about this story. She got into a Facebook fight last night with another friend who suggested that the press had a liberal bias....by the time it was done, she had drug the memory of our father, veterans of every war, etc etc etc. into it. She...like other liberals...simply can't stand that once again, they have failed.
Edited by Foxlair45, Apr 7 2015, 08:38 AM.
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