| UVA Rape Story Collapses; Duke Lacrosse Redux | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Dec 5 2014, 01:45 PM (60,436 Views) | |
| Baldo | Apr 7 2015, 01:01 PM Post #1006 |
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Metanarratives have been used for a long time in journalism and its not getting any better. Let's be honest Rolling Stone has always been about stories of rock & roll, drugs, fame, and celebrity since its start. It is there to sell its product and make money. Unfortunately metanarratives have taken root in our Universities as the humanities have turned into selling social agendas. Jann Wenner's is Net worth is estimated at $700 million USD (2015) http://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-businessmen/ceos/jann-wenner-net-worth/ It is not about the truth. |
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| Sydney Carton | Apr 7 2015, 01:04 PM Post #1007 |
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A long,very useful, summary here,though most of this is already known on this blog. http://hotair.com/archives/2015/04/07/that-time-a-lawyer-warned-how-colleges-could-become-a-snake-pit-of-injustice/ |
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| abb | Apr 7 2015, 01:19 PM Post #1008 |
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That time a lawyer warned how colleges could become a ‘snake pit of injustice’ posted at 1:21 pm on April 7, 2015 by Matt Vespa Ed and Christine wrote about Rolling Stone’s stunning failure on verifying key facts in their widely discredited–and now retracted–story about a gang rape at the University of Virginia on September 28, 2012. It was a story that captivated a nation, started another dialogue about rape on college campuses, and showed the dangers of rushing to judgement concerning these crimes. Why does due process go out the window when it comes to rape? In local and national news outlets, every other crime has at least a scintilla of doubt in the reporting. Murders, theft, credit card fraud, drugs, are some of the crimes where most of the public seems to exude the “wait and see/let’s see what the investigation turns up” aspect regarding justice. Again, of course, it’s not every case, but the intensity is never felt as much than with a reported rape. When attempts are made to ascertain the truth, cross-examine witnesses, cite data, or present exculpatory evidence, there are forces that seek to end that process. One could argue that colleges have established ad hoc law through school tribunals, where the threshold of evidence for a conviction has been lowered, which is a tacit acknowledgement that college campuses either don’t have the resources for a full-investigation, or that they’re not good investigators. That make sense; college administrators aren’t seasoned detectives. The new methods of combating sexual assault were mentioned in the CSJ’s report: In late 2009, the Center for Public Integrity began to publish a series of articles that helped inspire even stricter federal guidelines. The articles bared problems with the first generation of campus response: botched investigations by untrained staff members; adjudication processes shrouded in secrecy; and sanctions so lacking that they sometimes allowed rapists, including repeat offenders, to remain on campus while their victims fled school. The Obama administration took up the cause. It pressured colleges to adopt more rigorous systems, and it required a lower threshold of guilt to convict a student before school tribunals. The new pressure caused confusion, however, and, in some cases, charges of injustice. Last October, a group of Harvard Law School professors wrote that its university’s revised sexual misconduct policy was “jettisoning balance and fairness in the rush to appease certain federal administrative officials.” Indeed. Judith Grossman, a mother, lawyer, and feminist, wrote a harrowing account of the school tribunal system in 2013 after her son was accused of sexual assault by an ex-girlfriend (via WSJ) [emphasis mine]: On today’s college campuses, neither “beyond a reasonable doubt,” nor even the lesser “by clear and convincing evidence” standard of proof is required to establish guilt of sexual misconduct. These safeguards of due process have, by order of the federal government, been replaced by what is known as “a preponderance of the evidence.” What this means, in plain English, is that all my son’s accuser needed to establish before a campus tribunal is that the allegations were “more likely than not” to have occurred by a margin of proof that can be as slim as 50.1% to 49.9%. How does this campus tribunal proceed to evaluate the accusations? Upon what evidence is it able to make a judgment? The frightening answer is that like the proverbial 800-pound gorilla, the tribunal does pretty much whatever it wants, showing scant regard for fundamental fairness, due process of law, and the well-established rules and procedures that have evolved under the Constitution for citizens’ protection. Who knew that American college students are required to surrender the Bill of Rights at the campus gates? My son was given written notice of the charges against him, in the form of a letter from the campus Title IX officer. But instead of affording him the right to be fully informed, the separately listed allegations were a barrage of vague statements, rendering any defense virtually impossible. The letter lacked even the most basic information about the acts alleged to have happened years before. Nor were the allegations supported by any evidence other than the word of the ex-girlfriend. The hearing itself was a two-hour ordeal of unabated grilling by the school’s committee, during which, my son later reported, he was expressly denied his request to be represented by counsel or even to have an attorney outside the door of the room. The questioning, he said, ran far afield even from the vaguely stated allegations contained in the so-called notice. Questions from the distant past, even about unrelated matters, were flung at him with no opportunity for him to give thoughtful answers. Grossman, a self-described Ms. Magazine subscriber back in the day, wrote that she had the resources to provide legal assistance to her son. In the end, the charge was dropped, but not after this family was put through hell. “While my son was instructed by the committee not to ‘discuss this matter’ with any potential witnesses, these witnesses against him were not identified to him, nor was he allowed to confront or question either them or his accuser,” wrote Grossman. “Across the country and with increasing frequency, innocent victims of impossible-to-substantiate charges are afforded scant rights to fundamental fairness and find themselves entrapped in a widening web of this latest surge in political correctness.” Now, she noted that instances of rape on campus should be investigated and the perpetrators brought to justice, but you cannot do that without a basic system of fairness and due process. She ends her scathing piece on the whole process as a warning; that colleges could become “snake pit of injustice” and that “unbridled feminist orthodoxy is no more the answer than are attitudes and policies that victimize the victim.” Nevertheless, the orthodoxy within the feminist left seems to automatically believe alleged rape claims, as Charles Cooke of National Review wrote yesterday [emphasis mine]: In the Washington Post, Zerlina Maxwell argued that “we should believe, as a matter of default, what an accuser [of rape] says,” for “the costs of wrongly disbelieving a survivor far outweigh the costs of calling someone a rapist.” This view was seconded by the lawyer and journalist Rachel Sklar, who confirmed for posterity that she considers “women who speak of their own experiences” to be automatically “credible,” and anybody who asks questions to be a rape apologist. On Twitter, meanwhile, Slate’s Amanda Marcotte concluded that anybody who has questions about a given account must by definition be engaged in a dastardly attempt to demonstrate that no rape stories are ever true, while CNN’s Sally Kohn grew angry at Jonah Goldberg when he asked for more evidence. Perhaps the best example of the all-zetetics-are-heretics presumption came from the remarkably ungracious Anna Merlan, who rewarded Reason’s Robby Soave for his investigative work by throwing an epithet at him: “idiot.” Now, none of this is to say that Sabrina Erdely is not responsible for her own mistakes. Clearly, had she and her colleagues followed the established rules of journalism, they would not be in this position. But it is worth noting that, by so steadfastly refusing to do her due diligence, Erdely was in fact behaving exactly as a good portion of the “social justice” Left believes is proper. Her initial instinct — to find and to trump up a story in order to illustrate a supposedly broad problem — was that of the frustrated activist who, irked that his favorite injustice is not getting the attention that he just knows that it deserves, takes it upon himself to invent or to overstate or to falsely peddle a dramatic tale that will garner the requisite amount of attention and change the world for the better. Her methodology — more specifically, her failure to properly investigate her primary source for fear of vexing her or of “discouraging” other victims — has been widely endorsed by a good number of feminist commentators. 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.” Chloe Angyal of Feministing thanked Erdely on MSNBC last December for her article in Rolling Stone; this was also the time when the narrative was beginning to fall apart. I have to thank you, Sabrina, for writing this. I think you’ve done a tremendous act of public service, and I’m genuinely very, very grateful. It is hard to read an article like this and avoid the conclusion that we live in a culture that hates women, just hates us. It’s hard to read an article like this and conclude that the men in this culture, the boys and men in this culture, are raised to see women as not just less than them but in some cases as less than human. But one thing really stood out to me, which is the statistic about how boys and men in frats are three times more likely to commit sexual violence. But I think as Raul says — you know what, I just used a euphemism there, and I shouldn’t do that. They are three times more likely to commit rape. And I think Raul makes a really interesting point. This is not just about party schools. And it would be at our peril to pretend that this is just a frat problem. Yes, it at frats and football teams, but it also happens on the chess team and in dance companies. This is not just a frat problem. This is an American problem. Not really. Again, the facts and figures on college rape aren’t as clear-cut as they may seem when disseminated by pundits on television. In fact, they can be shoddy at times. Nevertheless, this isn’t about society not trusting women. CSJ makes it clear that the number of false rape allegations is very small, maybe 2-8 percent of all cases. But it certainly is a case about the rush to believe one side of the story–no matter what–before all the facts come to light at the conclusion of a proper investigation. As such, we should view any crime reported with healthy skepticism that’s grounded in due process of law. Let the evidence come out, let’s analyze, and then make our decision, which is usually carried out in a court of law. After all, isn’t being factual a cornerstone of justice. Update (Ed): Matt mistakenly wrote Columbia School of Journalism when he meant Rolling Stone. I’ve fixed it above. |
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| Walt-in-Durham | Apr 7 2015, 02:13 PM Post #1009 |
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I put together a brief, very brief survey of the defamation law in New York at my blog. I want to thank the Digital Media Project for the assistance. They had a lot of the work for New York law pulled together. Again, this is a survey. If a case gets filed, we'll know better the issues. I still think that the fraternity has problems with the limits on size found in the Restatement. It appears New York has not reached the issue of groups being defamed. So, this may be a case of first impression in New York. Walt-in-Durham |
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| abb | Apr 7 2015, 02:22 PM Post #1010 |
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http://spectator.org/articles/62330/all-family-sabrina-rubin-erdely-teresa-sullivan-columbia-j-school-and-msm All in the Family: Sabrina Rubin Erdely, Teresa Sullivan, the Columbia J-School, and MSM Rolling Stone’s Erdely and UVA’s Sullivan should apologize for their apologies. By Gilbert T. Sewall – 4.7.15 Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s 2014 Rolling Stone magazine article involving fraternity gang rape at the University of Virginia stands exposed and retracted. A troubled girl hoaxed Erdely. We will never know the degree to which Sabrina was complicit. At great cost to the University of Virginia and to Phi Kappa Psi, Rolling Stone’s editors and Erdely failed to verify what were almost impossible fictions. The odious University of Virginia president Teresa Sullivan rashly suspended fraternity operations and later imposed severe rules based on the incident. Haters threw bricks through Phi Psi windows. But the onus is on Erdely. Erdely embodies an engagé style of journalism that arose in the early 1990s. At 42, she does not play by the old rules. About the time she was starting out at the Daily Pennsylvanian, left-wing advocacy journalism — it sometimes self-flatteringly terms itself “investigative” — was taking on great cachet in newsrooms and editorial offices. Among blowing-in-the-wind senior faculty, at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, running with causes and crusades, not old-school “objectivity,” was white hot. A generation of journalists grew up inside this mindset. It’s the water they swim in. Many see themselves not just as reporters but as sentinels of a new, better America. Erdely’s putative apology published in the New York Times signs off with a self-conscious pirouette. She hope her “mistakes… do not silence the voices of victims that need to be heard.” Subtext: Sabrina cares. Perhaps Erdely actually feels blond fraternity beasts are a growing menace. Perhaps, mesmerized by feminism, Erdely may in her heart of hearts think the War on Women and Rape Culture are accelerating. But I bet not. Erdely looks to me as though she knows exactly what she’s selling, has been doing it for a while, and is good at click bait, bounce, and angles that draw the right kind of audience and applause. Until T. Rees Shapiro unraveled the story in a series of Pulitzer-worthy Washington Post articles, the MSM from Yahoo to the New York Times fanned Sabrina’s narrative with all its might. Big mistakes were made, a J-School report said on April 5. Then it added neutrally that the editors and progenitor of this fraud would continue on at the magazine. This is astonishing. There are many reasons why journalism is crashing before our eyes. But if you are on the Rolling Stone good-think list, it appears, after the J-School’s all-in-the-family dressing down is over and done, it’s back to business as usual. The shameful calumny should not end here. The day after the J-School report, Phi Psi announced plans to sue Rolling Stone. That’s a good beginning. Now I hope that: • Outstanding Virginia lawyers do their best to give Rolling Stone a legal you-know-what in court. • An enterprising journalism professor, maybe at the University of Virginia, goes after Sabrina’s oeuvre, re-checking her articles, starting with her attacks on the Catholic church and that old Progressive fave, clerical pedophilia. • Rolling Stone will tell us what Sabrina’s next assignment is. What tradition, established institution, or revered figure will get the Sabrina treatment? We should all be prepared with talking points, if blindsided. • The disgraceful UVA president Teresa Sullivan gets fired. She offered her own summa in the Times, along with Erdely’s. Her statement — not an apology — is remorseless and true to character. Sullivan is a great embarrassment in higher education. This brainless, style-free sociologist has no business being in charge of a great university and public trust. Her rush to judgment was wrong and her intransigence is revolting. Some inept Virginia trustees tried to get rid of her in 2012. Unfortunately they failed. |
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| abb | Apr 7 2015, 02:24 PM Post #1011 |
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http://www.richmond.com/news/virginia/article_d8671dd0-0962-5cf8-b327-147aa3c36fe1.html National fraternity says it supports UVa chapter's legal pursuit of Rolling Stone BY GRAHAM MOOMAW Richmond Times-Dispatch | Posted: Tuesday, April 7, 2015 11:00 am The national Phi Kappa Psi fraternity said Tuesday that it supports the efforts of its University of Virginia chapter to pursue a lawsuit against Rolling Stone over a discredited gang rape account, and hinted that the magazine could face legal action by the national organization. "The Phi Kappa Psi National Fraternity expresses its support for the Virginia Alpha Chapter at the University of Virginia and its pursuit of legal remedies in this matter," the fraternity said in a statement released Tuesday morning, adding that the national fraternity "continues independently to evaluate its options." The fraternity called on Rolling Stone to do more to remedy the"damage" done by its flawed story based on a young woman's claims that she was gang raped at the Charlottesville fraternity house in 2012, an allegation police have found no evidence to substantiate. Phi Psi said members of the U.V.a. chapter have "comported themselves honorably and with grace during a period of great stress and turmoil." "As a result of the unfounded claims of the Rolling Stone article, their civil rights have been infringed; their characters, impugned; and the course of their education, disrupted," the fraternity said. "They were threatened with physical violence; their living quarters were vandalized; and the spent the last six months living in the shadow of flagrant falsehoods. While their conduct throughout this ordeal has been exemplary, Rolling Stone's retraction and apology in no way address the material damage the story's false allegations have made to these young men and their chapter." The fraternity also criticized the apology by the article's writer, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, who is expected to continue to write for Rolling Stone. Erdely released a statement Sunday saying she had allowed her concern for and confidence in her main source, a student identified only as "Jackie," to "take the place of more questioning and more facts." "It is patently disingenuous of Ms. Erdely to use her concern for the victim as an excuse for gross and willful misrepresentation of the facts,"the fraternity said. The organization said Rolling Stone "has not gone far enough in addressing internal practices that promulgate sensationalist reportage at the expense of the truth." "A great deal of damage has been done without consequence to the perpetrators of this outrage," the fraternity said. "We call on the publisher to hold those involved to account." |
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| MikeZPU | Apr 7 2015, 02:37 PM Post #1012 |
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I am wondering if someone were to make this a racial issue, i.e., "How come the name of a black false rape accuser is released but not the name of a white false rape accuser? Isn't it racist to protect the name of a white false accuser but not the name a black false accuser? That sounds like white privilege!!!!" Maybe that would get them to release the name of Jackie?
Edited by MikeZPU, Apr 7 2015, 02:38 PM.
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| Joan Foster | Apr 7 2015, 02:54 PM Post #1013 |
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Mike, that is probably the one thing that would work. |
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| MikeZPU | Apr 7 2015, 03:00 PM Post #1014 |
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Joan: Now, if we could only think up a good slogan like "Hands up, Don't shoot" to go along with this campaign to release her name, like "A white lie is not a "white lie" unless it's white privilege." ![]() Edited by MikeZPU, Apr 7 2015, 05:34 PM.
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| cks | Apr 7 2015, 03:13 PM Post #1015 |
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Mike - Brilliant!!!!!
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| abb | Apr 7 2015, 03:52 PM Post #1016 |
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http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/04/rolling-stone-rape-reporting-disaster-bias.html The Unexamined Bias Behind Rolling Stone’s Rape Reporting Disaster By Jonathan Chait Follow @jonathanchait The Columbia Journalism Review's examination of Rolling Stone’s since-retracted report of an alleged rape at the University of Virginia is, on its own terms, a masterpiece of forensic meta-journalism. CJR has expertly deconstructed the methodological failure that led Rolling Stone to publish a report rife with easily verifiable falsehoods. And yet the terms of CJR’s report are oddly constrained. Its intensive focus on the story’s failures of reporting and editing ignores the obvious (though harder to pin down) ideological assumptions that produced those failures. “The problem was methodology,” CJR concludes, “compounded by an environment where several journalists with decades of collective experience failed to surface and debate problems about their reporting or to heed the questions they did receive from a fact-checking colleague.” But why did Rolling Stone flagrantly disregard basic journalistic safeguards in this instance? It seems very likely that the magazine’s staff was operating within a social and ideological environment that made the story’s narrative appear to be self-evidently correct. Of course, we don’t know what form Rolling Stone’s social and ideological assumptions took, since CJR does not explore them. But if the magazine’s approach to its story in any way reflected the assumptions of the liberal journalists who embraced it after its debate, then the magazine’s suspension of its normal journalism standards makes a great deal of sense. One of the peculiar, unexamined assumptions is that fraternity members are capable not only of loutishness or even rape, which is undeniable, but the sort of routine, systematized torture we would normally associate with serial killers or especially brutal regimes. The story describes a gang rape as a fraternity initiation ritual, complete with members referring to their victim as “it,” the way Buffalo Bill dehumanized his captive in Silence of the Lambs. You don’t need to feel much affinity for Greek culture — I certainly don’t — to question whether depravity on this scale is plausible. It’s the sort of error that could only be produced in an atmosphere of unquestioned loathing. Caitlin Flanagan, who has reported extensively on the pathology of fraternity culture, told Hanna Rosin that Rolling Stone’s gang rape scene beggared belief. But Flanagan and Rosin have both offended the left in different ways, so their skepticism merely served to convince Rolling Stone’s defenders that the story’s skeptics were motivated by anti-feminism: The second problem was a habit of left-wing thought treating rape accusations as a unitary phenomenon, rather than something that needs to be understood on a case-by-case method. When the first troubling signs about the factual veracity of Rolling Stone’s account surfaced, the story’s defenders reacted with incredulity. As Salon’s Katie McDonough put it, “So many of these protests about ethics and transparency are just the latest cover for the same tired bullshit: derailing public conversations about rape so that we will talk about virtually anything else.” The public atmosphere on the left allowed little room for even mild skepticism of the story’s veracity: Again, since CJR does not (or perhaps cannot) show us the ideological environment within Rolling Stone, we can’t know what the magazine’s writers and editors were thinking. But if their mentality in any way reflects the mentality of their outside allies, they would have walled themselves off from all doubt by treating skepticism of any single rape allegation as skepticism of all rape allegations. The story's defenders did not merely apply the understandable impulse to not dismiss a woman's testimony about rape; they described its critics, whose factual qualms were well-founded, as “rape apologists” or “rape deniers.” Their ideological approach makes it nearly impossible to explore the factual basis of a story. Indeed, Amanda Marcotte, who mocked skeptics of the story in December, has a new column headlined, “Sorry, Rape Deniers, the Rolling Stone report isn’t what you hoped.” In a sense, she is right. But the fact that CJR constructed its report on Rolling Stone in such a way that it could be held up as vindication by the very people who dismissed Rolling Stone’s critics as deranged misogynists suggests that it may have avoided the most important question. |
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| abb | Apr 7 2015, 04:15 PM Post #1017 |
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https://www.thefire.org/at-uva-students-miss-opportunity-for-discussion-about-campus-sexual-assault/ At UVA, Students Miss Opportunity for Discussion About Campus Sexual Assault By Susan Kruth April 7, 2015 Last Wednesday, the University of Virginia School of Law’s Student Legal Forum hosted a panel discussion on “Title IX, Due Process, and Campus Sexual Misconduct,” in which I participated along with Stuart Taylor of the Brookings Institution, Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute, and Emily Renda, a victims’ rights advocate now working at UVA. I am thankful for the opportunity to learn from, and find significant common ground with, all three of my co-panelists. Many audience members told me they felt the same. The event was the target of impassioned pushback from a small group of UVA Law students who argued that because of viewpoints Stuart, Heather, and I expressed in the past, the event shouldn’t take place at all. I believe this response was misguided. If we have learned anything this winter, it’s that the UVA community desperately needs frank discourse on this issue—even if it makes some individuals uncomfortable. At one of the nation’s top law schools, dedicated to teaching future attorneys how to debate and think critically, I expected to be confronted by ideas different from mine, and I looked forward to it. Yet despite organizers’ repeated attempts to garner participation by those who were likely to disagree with Stuart, Heather, and me, there was only one student who challenged my stance on how colleges should handle sexual misconduct during the event. A look at the controversy surrounding the panel helps to explain why. Wednesday’s discussion was initially co-sponsored by the university-wide Student Council and Student Legal Forum (SLF), a student group at the law school; closer to the date of the event, the student group Virginia Law Women joined them. Student Council created a Facebook event page in order to inform both law students and undergraduates about the panel. Though this page no longer exists, multiple students who spoke to me at the event told me that members of the student group Feminist Legal Forum (FLF) had argued via comments to the page that the event shouldn’t take place because it would not present a balance of viewpoints. FLF members made the same argument in emails to co-sponsors and the Student Bar Association, despite the SBA having no authority over the event. Stuart, Heather, and I had been labeled as hostile toward rape victims. (While the panel was being debated on Facebook, Emily had not yet been invited to speak.) SLF had originally planned to include a variety of viewpoints and invited several other victims’ rights advocates to participate, but they all declined, including some individuals recommended by FLF. Emily graciously agreed to participate just before the event. An FLF co-chair wrote in an email to me that Facebook commentary came from students writing as individuals, and that FLF’s only official group action was to tell students that the panel was “likely to be one-sided” and would not address “Title IX as a whole.” It is unclear what would have satisfied the group: During the panel, I reviewed how Title IX requires schools to respond to sexual assault, and I reiterated FIRE’s longstanding argument that institutions should provide a range of resources and options to complainants regardless of how they treat the accused. Other students encouraged their peers not to attend. One student who did so wrote in an email to me that she was concerned that “victims of sexual assault … could easily be triggered by the rhetoric of a one-sided panel.” It is worrying that in some students’ eyes, the presentation of due process concerns—even by lawyers who frequently note that campus sexual assault is a serious issue—is presumptively more dangerous than productive. The pressure from those objecting to the panel was apparently enough to motivate both Student Council and Virginia Law Women to withdraw their co-sponsorship less than a day before the event. (Many student groups, including the co-sponsors, had just elected new leadership, which may have played a role in the groups’ shifting positions.) Shortly after Student Council withdrew, it deleted the Facebook event, which prompted Facebook to send students a message that the event had been canceled. Student Council had previously posted to say that its withdrawal did not mean the cancellation of the event, and law student organizers tried to promote the event after the Facebook message was sent out. It is likely, however, that undergraduates were still left with the impression that the panel was, in fact, canceled—an unfortunate result. Still, the event went on. Commendably, law school dean Paul Mahoney and his wife, Professor Julia Mahoney, both backed SLF’s right to hold the event. An administrator with whom SLF worked to make arrangements for the event treated this one the same as any other. That is not to say the event went on without further conflict. About a half-hour into the panel, in the middle of Emily’s opening remarks, approximately 10 students engaged in a silent protest of the event. They walked in through one back door of the venue, up towards the front and between the panelists and the audience, and back out through the other back door—all the while snapping pictures of the audience and the panel. They did not speak, and though they undoubtedly drew some attention from the audience, Emily continued her statement during the protest. On Friday, one of the protesters taking photos emailed those whom she was able to identify from her pictures; this email was forwarded to me. “First,” she wrote, “I would like to apologize to anyone who was genuinely there to learn about the complex legal issues surrounding sexual assault”—as though audience members were presumptively attending for another reason. Second, she said, she supports due process rights, but opposes “[h]yperbolic discussions about false positives.” Had she actually attended the panel and listened to my statement, she would have heard me argue that due process principles are critically important to maintain the integrity of the campus and court systems regardless of how common or rare false accusations are. This student seemed to regret the possibility that her actions might have caused further discomfort for survivors, but her email failed to acknowledge what will be fairly obvious to Torch readers: It would have been far more productive to sit down and challenge Stuart, Heather, or me with questions or counter-points to our remarks. We might have learned something; the protesters might have learned something; surely the audience would have benefited from hearing such a conversation. As FIRE President Greg Lukianoff frequently urges students (and everyone, really): Find smart people with whom you disagree and talk with them. While it is, of course, each student’s right to express concerns about the event and choose not to participate, I was disappointed not to have the opportunity to speak with these students directly. It’s worth noting that everyone who sat down for the discussion was respectful, questions posed were thoughtful, and even those who were clearly upset by various statements by panel members were never disruptive in any way. Indeed, student accounts suggest that most of the law school either supported SLF’s hosting of the event or were indifferent to it. But it appeared that those who should have been most motivated to challenge the views of three of us on the panel to spark a productive discussion chose instead to stay silent, or simply not to attend. As I emphasized during the event, whatever the solution to campus sexual assault might be, talking openly about the issue is critically important. Yet in the effort to keep students “comfortable” or promote a single viewpoint alone, not enough voices are being heard. I hope that in the future, these student protesters embrace opportunities for discussion with due process advocates so that we can better understand each other. Preaching to the choir, after all, accomplishes much less than robust discussion or debate. |
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| Bill Anderson | Apr 7 2015, 09:28 PM Post #1018 |
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I had this story today on LRC: https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/04/william-l-anderson/campus-rape-hoaxes/ No, This is not the Last of the Campus Rape Hoaxes By William L. Anderson April 7, 2015 At last, with the usual fanfare of self-importance served with a side of dishonesty and arrogance, Rolling Stone admits that its November 2014 “A Rape on Campus” story was a hoax, a hoax created in “good faith” and in “sensitivity to a rape victim,” but a hoax nonetheless. As I had predicted in an earlier story, no one lost his or her job over this piece of fiction, and the writer, Sabrina Erdely, no doubt soon will be off to her next writing assignment for another high-profile American publication like New Yorker (which has published her work before) or even RS. In for a dime, in for a dollar. According to Columbia Journalism Review, which conducted the “investigation” of the RS journalistic malpractice, the magazine made one serious mistake: it depended upon one source and one source alone, the so-called victim named “Jackie.” Hey, no sh*t, Sherlock. An explosive story like this in which no one seems to care that a poor freshman girl has been brutally raped by seven men, thrown against a glass-topped table that shattered, leaving the “victim” covered in blood, and a supposedly reputable publication depends upon one person who turns out to be a pathological liar? And no one is canned for this?
No, the problem is not that Erdely failed to make phone calls. The problem is that the magazine decided to publish a story in which a supposedly-experienced and highly-touted writer did not follow even the basics of journalism, something that I learned nearly 40 years ago as a cub reporter for a newspaper in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The question to be answered is not why Erdely failed to do Fact Checking 101. It is abundantly clear to me why she failed to check the facts, and it was because this was The Story Too Good To Be True. Just as the Duke Lacrosse Case went airborne after the supposedly-reputable Raleigh News & Observer published an interview with Crystal Gail Mangum, who claimed to have been raped by members of the Duke lacrosse team, Erdely and the rest of the faux journalism gang at Rolling Stone decided that a bit of basic journalism research might ruin a good story. The N&O’s interview with Mangum contained numerous factual claims that easily could have been researched, but the editors decided to believe everything Mangum told them because it fit their ideological biases. Likewise, RS decided to pursue its “Rape on Campus” story in the manner it did because its editors already had given into the fiction that one in every five college females is raped, and that colleges and universities are awash in “rape culture.” To have done basic research, in their view, would have somehow cast doubt on their precious ideologies and the whole leftist notion that women at the University of Whatever are more likely to be raped than women in war zones where soldiers use rape as a weapon. Unfortunately, we are going to see more of these kinds of stories with the same results because Progressive publications such as RS want both to adhere to the fiction that is campus identity-based ideology and to those things called facts. Columbia Journalism Review declares:
No, this was not a fundamental problem of reporting and editing. True, what was reported was not true, but Erdely was not interested in the truth any more than the N&O and the New York Times were interested in the “truth” about the Duke Lacrosse Case. (At least the N&O did change the tenor of its coverage after its best investigative reporter, Joe Neff, took over the story. The NYT, on the other hand, decided to go down with the ship and protect a rogue prosecutor, Michael Nifong, even when Mangum’s account was as doomed as the Titanic.) Furthermore, CJR is sticking to the fictitious doctrine that “something happened” to “Jackie” that night, or at least that something “could” have happened:
To use a term that Progressive journalists love to attack, I would say the “something happened” theme is “faith-based.” Yes, we are supposed to believe that after “Jackie” had given a detailed account, complete with broken glass sticking in her back and all of the things uttered by her “seven rapists” that night, that somehow she got it all wrong, and that something else actually happened. Yes, she has absolutely no memory of what actually happened, but gives a full and coherent version of what did not happen. Please. What we are seeing is a dog-and-pony show, a staged expression of angst from The Usual Suspects in American journalism that will make way for the next campus hoax that Really Serious Journalists will claim is true. For example, did the NYT learn anything from its coverage in the Duke case? Not according to one of its former writers, Stuart Taylor, who also wrote extensively about what happened (and did not happen) at Duke:
Here is the problem, and it involves two things that are mutually exclusive: fact-based reporting and full acceptance of the Progressive-leftist “one-in-four, campus rape culture” theme. If one accepts the latter and intends to devote journalistic space to it, then one cannot engage in the former. It is that simple. In the wake of the UVA story last fall, I described the carnage of rape in war zones in Africa, where it is estimated that one in four women in those areas is raped by rampaging soldiers. I then added: Why do I begin with this passage that describes unthinkable brutality that soldiers inflict upon women? It is because President Obama, the U.S. Department of Education and almost all of the American media, along with college officials, want us to embrace the false notion that women on U.S. college and university campuses are raped at the same rate as women in the Congo and that the experiences are identical. To put it another way, Barack Obama wants us to believe that the campus is one of the most dangerous places for women in the entire world and certainly in the United States. The “campus rape culture” theme is fraudulent. Yes, rapes occur on college campuses, although most of what is called rape or sexual assault involves two people who are drunk, with the female deciding after the fact that she regrets the sexual encounter which at the time likely would have been deemed consensual. College campuses, as much as they have been turned into zones of hard leftism, bastions of suppression of speech, and propaganda centers, they are not the Second Coming of the Congo, at least as far as females on campus are considered. (I do not endorse the oversexed atmosphere on campus, nor do I endorse the party scenes that often involve immoral and self-destructive behavior. These bacchanalias that would rival a Roman orgy are fueled by “easy money” of student debt and truly are a blot on decent civilization. But they are not the Congo, at least not yet.) Given all of the ideological baggage carried by RS and the NYT, and just about every other major U.S. journalistic outfit, the UVA story was a train wreck waiting to happen. However, as Tallyrand said of the French dynasty, the Bourbons, “They learned nothing, and they forgot nothing.” Likewise, for all of the “we learned our lesson this time” nonsense we hear time and again, as long as journalists continue to embrace the false “one-in-four” claims regarding campus rapes, we are going to get stories like what RS gave us last November. To be honest, journalists will not be able to help themselves the next time a Too Good To Be True story stands in front of them. They will give into the ideology, and sooner or later, there will be no investigation because ideological blindness will ensure that readers are expected to embrace falsehoods and no investigation will be deemed necessary because Progressive ideology demands that people believe that which is unbelievable.
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| MikeZPU | Apr 7 2015, 10:40 PM Post #1019 |
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Prof Anderson: tour-de-force piece that is spot on, exposing the hoax that is modern-day progressive journalism. It is crystal clear that the media did not learn anything from the Duke Lacrosse case, nor did high-level college administrators (e.g., Teresa Sullivan.) They turn a blind eye to the fact that there are women who not only lie about rape but also lace their false story of rape with fantastic details. Let's also not forget about the women who falsely accused David Copperfield of rape. And here's another fantastic story of a student being raped at Purdue, only it was made up: http://www.cotwa.info/2015/02/disturbing-false-rape-claim-at-purdue.html |
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| Mason | Apr 8 2015, 12:12 AM Post #1020 |
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Parts unknown
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. Have you noticed no one knows Crystal's name, including the biggest talking heads in the country They cite the case and none of them know her name. |
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