Perhaps Rolling Stone would like a little introspection given their fear mongering and false reporting about the University of Virginia.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/17/business/media/rolling-sto...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/17/business/media/rolling-sto...
Rolling Stone did retract the story, and has done some considerble introspection on the topic.
http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/a-rape-on-campu...
A key point of the story for me, having seen multiple other instances of people claiming narratives which proved false, is that it is difficult to guard against someone who is committed to telling and promoting untruth. The more so if the person appeals to you as sympathetic or persuasive. This is at the very heart of the con.
It's why being both compassionate to someone who's claiming wrongdoing, and making triply-certain you've dotted all 'i's and crossed all 't's is so crucial.
Hoaxes and (bogus) conspiracy stories, financial and business cons, and political cons work like this. They press all our psychological levers which are geared toward belief, and twist them. Piltdown Man, Crop Circles, Clever Hans (the more so as the perpetrator himself was by all accounts among the deceived), the Chess Turk, and other hoaxes.
I could draw more examples from current headlines, though that might prove more divisive.
people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones
> Rolling Stone did retract the story, and has done some considerble introspection on the topic.
Let's look at that link:
"Erdely and her editors had hoped their investigation would sound an alarm about campus sexual assault and would challenge Virginia and other universities to do better."
They weren't reporting news, they were doing advocacy and fear mongering. Nowhere do they say, this is a bad thing for journalists to do.
"At Columbia, an aggrieved student dragged a mattress around campus to call attention to her account of assault and injustice. The facts in these cases were sometimes disputed, but they had generated a wave of campus activism."
"Sometimes disputed: must be the new word for the accused was innocent[1]. Even their outside report is dishonest about the subject.
Also, the whole section on their asking for comment from the fraternity without providing any information on what the reporter wanted comment about is beyond unkind.
but as to learning from the experience:
"Yet Rolling Stone's senior editors are unanimous in the belief that the story's failure does not require them to change their editorial systems."
1) http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/29/magazine/have-we-learned-a...