Tag: rolling stone
Trump Insults Fiorina’s Face — And Carson’s Skills As A Doctor

Trump Insults Fiorina’s Face — And Carson’s Skills As A Doctor

Donald Trump is at it again, and he’s taking on two opponents at once.

A new profile in Rolling Stone followed Trump on the campaign trail — and recounted this story of Trump insulting Carly Fiorina at just the sight of her on a TV screen:

When the anchor throws to Carly Fiorina for her reaction to Trump’s momentum, Trump’s expression sours in schoolboy disgust as the camera bores in on Fiorina. “Look at that face!” he cries. “Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?!” The laughter grows halting and faint behind him. “I mean, she’s a woman, and I’m not s’posedta say bad things, but really, folks, come on. Are we serious?”

“I”m not talking about looks,” Trump insisted Thursday morning on CNN, “I’m talking about persona.” He then began elaborating on Fiorina’s record as a lousy CEO at Hewlett-Packard and Lucent.

“But then you should say that,” host Chris Cuomo responded.

Trump also added that he liked the photos in the Rolling Stone article, but the editors “screwed it up… because they added a lot of stuff — a lot of garish stuff that I think is disgusting.”

As in, they put in direct quotes from Donald Trump?

Trump is also firing back at Ben Carson — who had been catching up on him in recent polls — after Carson on Wednesday publicly questioned Trump’s professions of religious faith, on the grounds of a clear lack of personal humility.

In response to questions from reporters, Carson quoted the Book of Proverbs: “‘By humility and the fear of the Lord are riches and honor and life.’ And that’s a very big part of who I am — humility and fear of the Lord. I don’t get that impression with him. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t get that impression.”

Trump delivered his response to this during the same interview with Chris Cuomo.

“Ben Carson, you’re talking about his faith. Excuse me, Chris, go back and look at his past. Go back and look at his views on abortion and see where he stands,” Trump said — possibly an allusion to the controversy over whether Carson might have been involved with medical research on aborted fetal tissue.

“Now all of a sudden he gets on very low key. I mean frankly, he makes Bush look like the Energizer Bunny. He’s very low key, he’s got a lot of donors, a lot of people pushing him — but Ben Carson, you look at his faith, and I think you’re not gonna find so much. And you look at his views on abortion, which were horrendous — and that’s, I think, why I’m leading with all the evangelicals.”

“I happen to be a great believer in God, a great believer in the Bible,” Trump also insisted. “Who’s he — hey Chris, who’s he to question my faith when I am — I mean, he doesn’t even know me. I’ve met him a few times. I don’t know Ben Carson.”

And then Carson questioned perhaps Carson’s single most impeachable virtue — his skill as a neurosurgeon: “He was a doctor — perhaps, you know, an okay doctor by the way. You can check that out too. We’re not talking about a great — he was an okay doctor. He was just fine. And now because he’s a doctor and he hired one nurse, he’s gonna end up being the President of the United States?”

Note: Ben Carson was the first doctor to successfully separate conjoined twins at the head.

Photo: U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump addresses a Tea Party rally against the Iran nuclear deal at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on September 9, 2015. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

Late Night Roundup: Jon Stewart vs. ‘Rolling Stone’

Late Night Roundup: Jon Stewart vs. ‘Rolling Stone’

Jon Stewart absolutely slammed Rolling Stone magazine for its discredited story of an alleged fraternity rape at the University of Virginia — and also the fact that the magazine isn’t firing anybody over this: “Yet somehow in a sea of verifiable assaults, you managed to ‘Where’s Waldo?’ the only rape story that not only would fail to get your point across, but set the cause back. Someone’s gotta go!”

Larry Wilmore discussed the killing in North Charleston, South Carolina, of unarmed African-American man Walter Scott by a police officer, which was caught on video. And he reiterated his longstanding offer to America: He’ll stop talking about racism — when racism stops happening.

Conan O’Brien highlighted the latest messianic claims that North Korea makes about the young dictator Kim Jong Un.

James Corden presented his feature, “Celebrity Amazon Wishlist.” Tonight’s special subject was Jeb Bush — in light of Jeb having checked off the “Hispanic” box on his voter registration form — plus Hillary Clinton, and actor/pro-wrestler Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.

Note: A previous version of this story incorrectly identified the North Charleston shooting as being located in North Carolina, rather than the actual state of South Carolina.

As If ‘Rolling Stone’ Were Our Only Problem

As If ‘Rolling Stone’ Were Our Only Problem

There’s no tap dance in my shoes over Columbia Journalism Review‘s epic takedown this week of the Rolling Stone story that never should have seen the light of day.

That may strike you as an odd confession, but that just means you’re probably not a journalist. We’ve got a lot of bad habits.

I’ve read so many accounts of the post-mortem coverage on the CJR report that I worry that my mentioning it here will only tax your patience. But rule No. 1 of column writing is that you must never assume everyone shares your current preoccupation.

On Nov. 19, Rolling Stone published a story about a gang rape of a woman, named Jackie, at a fraternity house at the University of Virginia. It was a gruesome tale of men behaving like animals and a university that wanted nothing to do with the aftermath. The story attracted more than 2.7 million online viewers and an almost immediate onslaught of critics insisting that something — a lot, actually — wasn’t right about the reporting.

The story quickly began to unravel, in real time. Less than three weeks after it posted the story, Rolling Stone retracted it and asked Columbia Journalism Review to conduct an independent investigation on what had gone wrong.

The answer: Pretty much everything.

To quote from CJR’s findings:

“The failure encompassed reporting, editing, editorial supervision and fact-checking. 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. …

“The story’s blowup comes as another shock to journalism’s credibility amid head-swiveling change in the media industry. The particulars of Rolling Stone‘s failure make clear the need for a revitalized consensus in newsrooms old and new about what best journalistic practices entail, at an operating-manual-level of detail.”

There’s not a journalist still working in this business who doesn’t recognize the truth in that last sentence. No matter where we work, we’re all seeing the fraying edges: Too many editors pressuring reporters to post early and often. Too many single-source stories later rewritten with “updates” rather than corrections. Too many reporters agreeing to submit questions in writing to people who should have to answer unscheduled calls. Public officials, for example. Hospital administrators, for another.

Thousands of veteran reporters have been laid off or fired or pushed so far into irrelevance that they feel forced to resign. So many young reporters are taking their place, but not really. I do not mean to disparage young journalists. We were them, once upon a time, but we were allowed to grow into those jobs. In the best newsrooms, most of our mistakes never made it past the first edit.

When the news broke about CJR‘s findings, I noticed little of the celebratory tone of old. There was a time when that was our habit. A fellow journalist would go down for the count, and we’d marvel for days, if not weeks, over how the wretched sap ever could have thought he or she would get away with it. We are, at our core, professional gossips, and no news traveled faster than the demise of a competitor, which was anyone whose stories got bigger play than ours. In the dark, cramped space of our competitive hearts, the practice of journalism has always been a zero-sum game. Your Page One is my bad day.

Those days seem so over, as is our self-congratulatory tone of due diligence when we lower the ax of self-scrutiny. With this latest CJR report, what I once would have championed as a stellar example of how we police our own now just feels like another withering blow to our collective credibility.

I am grateful to CJR‘s Sheila Coronel, Steve Coll, and Derek Kravitz for their investigation into everything that went wrong and to Rolling Stone for its willingness to make the whole ugly thing public.

My gratitude ends there.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and an essayist for Parade magazine. She is the author of two books, including …and His Lovely Wife, which chronicled the successful race of her husband, Sherrod Brown, for the U.S. Senate. To find out more about Connie Schultz (con.schultz@yahoo.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

Photo via Wikicommons

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)