Rolling Stone's investigation: “A failure that was avoidable” | Hacker News Reader

Rolling Stone's investigation: “A failure that was avoidable”

article2.cjr.org

34 pointsparennoob21 comments

It's inconceivable that nobody was fired for this. And that nobody will call this what it was -- a hoax of monumental proportions, perpetrated by the accuser and a credulous magazine that was more interested in promoting a social cause than in doing real journalism.

I suspect that if we dig deeper we will find more stories like this in the past from Rolling Stone. As the Wall Street Journal tech columnist put it, "There's irony in a publication assailing universities for systemic failure claiming its own failure is an unrepresentative one-off."

Agree someone should be fired.

But it isn't clear that this all happened because of "promoting a social cause." It's equally likely that they just thought it was a super-juicy story and wanted the pageviews. And indeed the article was super-popular - the most popular ever except for "celebrity stories" (whatever that means). That is motive enough for a paper to publish a story, sadly.

The full report doesn't corroborate ideological causes here; the closest is over-caution at disturbing the accuser and stopping to investigate wherever she asked.

The opening paragraph includes this line: -- Erdely said she was searching for a single, emblematic college rape case that would show “what it’s like to be on campus now … where not only is rape so prevalent but also that there’s this pervasive culture of sexual harassment/rape culture,” according to Erdely’s notes of the conversation. --

If that's not promoting a specific cause, I'm not sure what is.

She was looking for a sensational story. Someone fed her one. Erdely still has a job. Jackie isn't in jail. All of the fraternities and sororities were punished. And the UVA president says "The story unfairly maligned UVa and many members of our community" and has yet to offer an apology for punishing the entire system without anything that resembled evidence, let alone an actual investigation.

I hope Erdely, Rolling Stone, "Jackie", and UVA are sued by the fraternity and entire greek system.

And true to form, missing from Erdely's apology [1] was a specific apology to the people most directly harmed, the fraternity in question. While Rolling Stone's apology directly apologized to them, Erdely instead took the route of apologizing to them, if at all, under the collective banner of "the UVa community." As was made clear by her commentary after the original piece was published, this is a woman who blames fraternities for "rape culture" on college campuses and even after libeling this specific chapter, she can't bring herself to apologize to them.

[1] https://twitter.com/ravisomaiya/status/584862956195807232

There is a difference between promoting a cause, and having a prior belief. Yes, they mention that in the report. She definitely went into the story believing that rape is a serious problem on campus, and that universities do a poor job at preventing it and handling it, and she wanted to report on that.

Her prior belief certainly made her more likely to be misled by Jackie. However, that isn't the same as saying that Erdely's main motivation was the social cause of preventing rape, when the simpler explanation is that the story would garner massive pageviews.

Of course, it is very possible both were a factor. My point is that there is no need to jump to conclusions about her motivations. Her actions are bad enough - the report shows her in a horrible light - objectively speaking, regardless of what we can speculate about her inner thoughts.

But why was the premise of reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely taken seriously to start with: "what it’s like to be on campus now ... where not only is rape so prevalent but also that there’s this pervasive culture of sexual harassment/rape culture”? This is clearly nonsense, there is no such thing as rape culture, unless you take the Andrea Dworkinite position that all heterosexual intercourse is rape.

The problem has always been that pure journalism has always taken a backseat to ideology (be it left right or mainstream) or money (circulation, pageviews)

I wish pure journalism were more viable. By that I mean, publish, within reasonable certainty) all the things they can delve into, whether or not they contradict causes, personalities or society. Sadly, it appears that just does not sell. The news have to "resonate"

To put this all into perspective, it looks like somebody got fired at the Rolling Stone over a negative review of a Hootie & the Blowfish album: http://articles.latimes.com/1996-06-09/entertainment/ca-1313...

It should also not be forgotten that the UVA rape hoax story was covered uncritically by all mainstream media and not just in the US, even though it smelled like a hoax from day one. Same with the 'mattress girl'. Nobody will be fired for this at the Guardian, at the NYT, at ... Critical journalism is dead.

The Washington Post began raising questions pretty quickly, and as I recall the NYT wasn't far behind.

They first went along with the hoax. They should never have done this, as the Rubin Erdely article was obviously a hoax. But damsel-in-distress articles just sell very well (see mattress girl, also obviously a hoax), and few people have the stomach these days to confront the twitter/tumblerina/feminist hate-mob. An independent journalist (whose name escapes me at the moment) was the first to have the guts to point out the obvious. The Wapo and NYT then, very gingerly, and clearly reluctantly expressed some doubt. As far as I'm aware they also never did their journalistic homework and do investigation of the UVA hoax of their own ... too expensive I guess ... why think for yourself when you can simply print somebody's PR material?

PS The name of the reporter was Richard Bradley, who's written a good new overview of the UVA situation: http://www.richardbradley.net/shotsinthedark/2015/04/07/in-t...

Thank you for the link. Its almost unbelievable.

Ever since Brian Williams,I've been feeling like journalism in america is dead.

but this just hammers the point home.

Over the past few years it's become really striking to me how dangerous it is when people attach their hopes re: a larger cause to a sensational story and let confirmation bias seep in.

You saw it here with Erdely letting her crusade against campus rape (an admirable goal, obviously) draw her into an outlandish story rather than reporting on a less-sexy but more representative account, you saw it in Ferguson where people tied their (valid) desire to eliminate discriminatory policing to the now-debunked "hands up don't shoot" narrative, you saw it in the Ellen Pao case where a large contingent of women tied their (valid/desirable) aspirations for gender equality in the workplace to a flimsy/exceedingly nuanced case when there are undoubtedly a bunch of open-and-shut gender discrimination cases.

In a click/cause-driven media environment, it behooves us to critically examine sources' leanings and blind spots upfront since it's become clear many can't do so themselves.

Several other reads for those looking to learn more about the situation or hear commentary:

Also from CJR: "What was the single point of failure at Rolling Stone? The authors of Columbia's investigative report answer that and more" - http://article.cjr.org/q_and_a/columbia_journalism_school_in...

"Statement from writer of Rolling Stone rape article, Sabrina Erdely" (also includes statement from UVA President Teresa A. Sullivan) - http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/06/business/media/statement-f...

"The journalism community reacts to the review of 'A Rape On Campus' " -http://www.poynter.org/news/mediawire/332683/the-journalism-...

The part I've always found weird about this story, and the meta-reporting about it, is that the article is long. There's the story about Jackie, which is a hook to get you reading and appropriately horrified (and at least in my circle of acquaintances, often the spot where they stop reading because they can't any more...). But the rest of the story is about a university that can't deal with so many problems of a similar nature, and that makes up the bulk of the article. Jackie or no Jackie, is the article accurate that, for instance, the university is nicknamed "UVrApe"? And where did that come from?

It feels to me like, if Rolling Stone had merely decided not to go for the shocking opening story, and decided to call it something other than "A", singular, "Rape on Campus," they'd have had an excellent, well-fact-checked article about many rapes on campus. Which is a far more important problem for the university, the alumni, the local police, and the wider community to worry about than the details of Jackie's story. And the author acknowledges that: "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." In other words, there would have been a story either way.

Am I the only one who reads it this way, and thinks there still is a story even as the article was written? CJR calls Jackie's story "the main narrative in 'A Rape on Campus'", but it doesn't feel like the main narrative at all. If you read a news story about a kid with some horrible childhood disease, and the third paragraph opens "Billy is not alone. Thousands of children across the US have been diagnosed with...," is Billy's story the main narrative? If Billy turned out to be misdiagnosed, does that affect the story?

> Am I the only one who reads it this way, and thinks there still is a story even as the article was written?

Well, if you read the full report that came out today, then it is clear that there was at least one other major problem in the story. It said that the university did a poor job of handling rape accusations, cared more about its reputation, and so forth. But that turned out to be wrong.

Specifically, the report details how the university president and other officials were barred from discussing cases for legal reasons - confidentiality of students and various other federal statutes. What to the reporter seemed like a coverup or negligence, was in fact doing their proper diligence as per the law.

Furthermore, the report mentions that several rape survivors they talked to (in the course of making the report) said that UVA had good policies in place for handling rape cases. They have good resources to give to survivors, and they do care about them. Somehow Rolling Stone missed those.

Thanks, I missed that. That's good to know (and also good to hear).

I don't understand why nobody's pressing charges against Jackie. Seems to be a clear defamation case.

The full report mentions that her lawyer told her not to talk to them, when they asked her for comment. So she has a lawyer, possibly because she is being sued, or anticipating being sued.

Any lawsuit would not be filed until today anyhow - this report is a major piece of information.

Because even fraternities' lawyers are not idiots, and they know that nothing good would come of that, even if it could be proven that Jackie's telling the story to a reporter was tortious (which it might not even be).

http://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/31kbp6/no_firings_at_r...

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