Tag: columbia school of journalism
Why Trust Anything In ‘Rolling Stone’ Again?

Why Trust Anything In ‘Rolling Stone’ Again?

So here’s my question: Why would a conscientious citizen ever again trust anything published in Rolling Stone? To me, the diligent professors at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism went too easy on the magazine’s reporters and editors.

Rolling Stone’s doomed article about a make-believe gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity house was more than “a story of journalistic failure that was avoidable.” The magazine and its editors made themselves willing, if not downright eager, parties to a hoax — and not a terribly sophisticated hoax at that.

Frankly, it’s getting to where the cultural left’s credulousness about melodramatic tales of victimization quite matches the conspiracy mongering of the right.

But hold that thought.

That nobody’s resigning or getting fired strikes me as the death knell for Rolling Stone’s reputation. More than that, its editors profess themselves “unanimous in the belief that the story’s failure does not require them to change their editorial systems.” They even insist that the article’s author, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, will write for them again.

I’ll believe that when I see it. Perhaps she can write captions for cute kitten photos or an astrology column. Have I mentioned that Erdely teaches journalism classes at the University of Pennsylvania?

Anyway, to hear them tell it, the editors’ biggest mistake was bending over backward to protect the tender sensibilities of the “survivor of a terrible sexual assault.” One confessed that “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.”

Noble sentiments. However, what rape victim? After a four-month probe, the Charlottesville police department concluded there was no credible evidence to support Rolling Stone’s melodramatic narrative. None whatsoever. Although the police chief — clearly pandering to campus political sentiments — conceded that his investigation didn’t prove nothing bad ever happened to “Jackie,” the magazine’s one and only source.

Of course no investigation can ever prove such a thing. Only that not a single verifiable element of Jackie’s story checked out. There wasn’t even a frat party on the night of the supposed drunken gang bang.

Of the many falsehoods Jackie spun for the enraptured Erdely, my personal favorite is “Haven Monahan.” That’s the name of the handsome classmate Jackie told friends escorted her to the imaginary party. The friends were unable to confirm that the fellow was enrolled at UVA, possibly because — and what are the odds? — there appears to be nobody by that name living anywhere in the United States of America.

Erdely told the Columbia sleuths she began to harbor doubts about Jackie’s trustworthiness when she wasn’t sure how to spell her betrayer’s name. Alas, her Rolling Stone piece was already in print; she’d been touting it all over MSNBC and CNN. The Journalism School team politely pretended to believe this improbable tale.

Because until then, see, neither Erdely, her editors, Rolling Stone’s fact checkers, nor even — astonishing to me — the magazine’s libel lawyers had done a single bit of journalistic due diligence regarding Jackie’s tale of woe. They’d swallowed it whole, making no effort to contact the three pseudonymous friends whom the magazine “quoted” as warning Jackie that reporting the crime would make her a campus pariah. They’d taken Jackie’s word for it.

It was the same with the alleged perps. Erdely took no serious steps to contact them. Even the failure of Jackie’s mother to return phone calls failed to clue in the enraptured reporter that something might be fishy. Her editors played right along.

Actually, there’s a psychiatric term called “folie à deux” in which two closely allied persons come to share the same delusional belief. However, it’s impossible to know Jackie’s state of mind, since she’s gone into hiding. By her own account, Erdely arrived in Charlottesville with strong convictions about campus “rape culture” and the wickedness of WASP fraternity boys — particularly Southern ones.

She let the theme determine the facts, an elementary blunder. “Those failures were so profound and so basic that it’s hard to know how we can even look at this as a teachable moment,” writes Northeastern University journalism professor Dan Kennedy on his “Media Nation” blog. “The lesson is ‘don’t do any of this.’”

Writing in The Daily Beast, Columbia University linguist John McWhorter challenges what he sees as the self-delusions of the sentimental left: “The whole sordid affair has been about something much larger: the idea that the pursuit of justice can be separated from facts; that metaphorical truth can be more important than literal truth.”

That is, that because some girls get mauled at fraternity parties, all self-proclaimed “survivors” should be depicted as martyrs. To dissent is seen as symptomatic of bad faith or worse. Resisting such thinking, whether in Charlottesville or Ferguson, Missouri, can be hard.

Even so, it’s a journalist’s most important job.

Photo: University of Virginia (Adam Fagen/Flickr)

Student At Center Of Rolling Stone Story Is Not To Blame, Investigation Authors Say

Student At Center Of Rolling Stone Story Is Not To Blame, Investigation Authors Say

By Matt Pearce, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

The University of Virginia student at the center of a discredited Rolling Stone rape story was not to blame when a “systemic” failure of journalism led the magazine to publish her unverified account of the alleged attack, the authors of an outside investigation into the story said Monday.

“This failure was not the subject or source’s fault as a matter of journalism,” Columbia University Journalism School dean Steve Coll, who co-authored the report, said at a news conference in New York. “It was a product of failed methodology. … We disagree with any suggestion that this was Jackie’s fault,” referring to the student, who was only identified by her first name.

The public dissection of the independent report came as criticism against Rolling Stone mounted, with the fraternity accused in the story announcing Monday it would pursue “all available legal action.”

Rolling Stone on Sunday night retracted and apologized for the November cover story as soon as the Columbia report was released. The Columbia team reiterated Monday that it found deep flaws in the reporting and editing of the woman’s narrative of her allegedly being gang raped at a University of Virginia fraternity.

“The report by Columbia University’s School of Journalism demonstrates the reckless nature in which Rolling Stone researched and failed to verify facts in its article,” Stephen Scipione, president of the Virginia Alpha chapter of that fraternity, said in a statement provided to the Los Angeles Times. “This type of reporting serves as a sad example of a serious decline of journalistic standards.”

Questions about the authenticity of the rape story had emerged almost immediately after publication, although the school took the accusations seriously and brought in the police. In the end, neither police investigators nor the Columbia University report found evidence that such a rape happened at the fraternity.

“The abject failure of accountability in journalism that led to Rolling Stone‘s ‘A Rape on Campus’ article has done untold damage to the University of Virginia and our Commonwealth as a whole,” Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe said in a Monday statement. “This false account has been an unnecessary and dangerous distraction from real efforts to combat sexual violence on our college campuses.”

After retracting the rape story, the magazine removed it from its website and replaced it with the 12,644-word independent review by Columbia.

The review, which also found serious lapses in basic journalistic procedure, had been requested by Rolling Stone in December as doubts grew.

Coll said the report’s authors hoped to construct a “case study” that would be useful for journalists, journalism students, and the public “to see exactly how the editorial process broke down.”

He said that breakdown was not the result of the account Jackie gave, but of the magazine’s “failed methodology” in not confirming its basic accuracy.

Sheila Coronel, a dean of academic affairs at Columbia University and a co-author of the report, said the Columbia team decided not to fully identify the student known as Jackie even though her allegations of a gang rape could not be proved.

An attorney for Jackie declined to comment Monday. Jackie did not cooperate with either the police investigation or the Columbia review into the Rolling Stone story.

Although Rolling Stone‘s systemic breakdowns in verification and attribution marked one of the ugliest blemishes in the magazine’s sometimes storied history, Rolling Stone‘s publisher had no plans to fire any of the editors or the writer involved with the story, a spokeswoman said.

Through that spokeswoman, Rolling Stone‘s publisher, Jann S. Wenner, and its managing editor, Will Dana, declined requests for interviews with the Los Angeles Times on Monday.

In an interview with The New York Times on Sunday, Wenner had called Jackie “a really expert fabulist storyteller,” adding that he was not trying to blame Jackie, “but obviously there is something here that is untruthful, and something sits at her doorstep.”

The Columbia report’s authors found no instances of fabrication or lying on the part of Rolling Stone.

Rather than blame a single person for the story’s failure — such as the author, Sabrina Rubin Erdely — the Columbia authors instead detailed a systemic breakdown of journalism at Rolling Stone.

“The failure encompassed reporting, editing, editorial supervision, and fact-checking,” wrote the Columbia authors — deans Coronel, Coll, and Derek Kravitz, a postgraduate research scholar at the journalism school.

“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.”

Through a spokeswoman, Erdely declined an interview request Sunday evening, but she apologized in a statement after the Columbia report was published, calling the last few months “among the most painful of my life.”

She apologized “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.”

(c)2015 Los Angeles Times, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC

Photo: Adam Fagen via Flickr