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Comment by brighteyes | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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.

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.

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"

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