By Erik Wemple April 9, 2015

News organizations commonly like to zag when all their competitors are zigging. That’s what the Associated Press (AP) has done regarding the disastrous Rolling Stone story on sexual assault at the University of Virginia, a November 2014 piece written by Sabrina Rubin Erdely.

Following a damning report from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, many are wondering why no one at Rolling Stone has been fired. Others are investigating Erdely’s archive. Yet others plumbing the damage done by “A Rape on Campus.”

The AP? It’s asserting that, aside from this whole U-Va. mess, Erdely had an “illustrious” career going. The lede of its April 7 piece: “The retracted Rolling Stone article about an apparently fictional gang rape at the University of Virginia is a blemish on an otherwise illustrious career for the journalist who wrote it.”

Substantiation for this judgment comes chiefly from this paragraph:

Some of her most prominent stories have been about the seedy underbelly of prestigious worlds. She has written about a suburban mother addicted to heroin and another who ran a prostitution service; she told the story of an autistic boy busted for selling marijuana to an undercover police officer who had befriended him. She has twice been a finalist for National Magazine Awards for pieces on harassment of gay students at a Minnesota high school and sexual misconduct by a doctor.

Though the story recaps the infirmities of “A Rape on Campus,” it’s essentially a rehab job, as it quotes supportive comments from people who worked years ago with Erdely at Philadelphia Magazine. It also includes these words: “Some of those who have worked with her see her as diligent and sensitive.”

The story strikes an eerie note in half-exonerating Erdely by vacating the most extreme charges against her: “The Columbia report did not support what some critics have speculated – that Erdely made it up.”

That’s accurate but incomplete. The Columbia report indeed separates the misdeeds of Erdely and her editors from the fabrications of the New York Times’s Jayson Blair. And in an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review, Steve Coll, dean of the Columbia j-school and an author of the report, said this about the findings:

Speaking only for myself … if I had encountered evidence of that kind of conduct by anyone at Rolling Stone, if they had lied, if they had invented notes, if they had misled their colleagues or misrepresented themselves, then I would have been tempted to call for direct accountability. But that’s not the case here. This was a systematic and collective failure. But there is no evidence that anyone was dishonest in those ways. So that, to me, left it to Rolling Stone to judge.

The implication here is that the Rolling Stone story consisted of an unfortunate accretion of honest mistakes. Except! Erdely’s story describes how three friends of the central victim in the story, “Jackie,” steered her away from reporting an alleged gang rape to the police. One of them was pseudonymously named “Randall,” and he wasn’t talkative, according to the story: “Greek life is huge at UVA, with nearly one-third of undergrads belonging to a fraternity or sorority, so Jackie fears the backlash could be big — a “s[—]show” predicted by her now-former friend Randall, who, citing his loyalty to his own frat, declined to be interviewed.”

“Declined to be interviewed” is a straightforward piece of reportorial signpostage meaning that the reporter had contacted the person and that person turned down an interview. No such transaction occurred in this case, however, as the report made clear. Instead, Erdely relied on Jackie to vouch for “Randall’s” feelings. The result, in the words of the report, was this: “Not only did this mislead readers about the quote’s origins, it also compounded the false impression that Rolling Stone knew who ‘Randall’ was and had sought his and the other friends’ side of the story.”

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Another element of dishonesty or sleaze or what-have-you relates to the magazine’s attempt to extract a comment from the fraternity — Phi Kappa Psi — where the alleged gang rape had allegedly taken place. As the report notes, Erdely provided fraternity leaders with insufficient detail on the claims of Jackie, such that their eventual response appeared more like a cover-up than an attempt at accountability.

In any case, it’s these questions that now deserve additional scrutiny and attention — not the glories of Erdely’s pre-Jackie career.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik...for-u-va-story/

http://www.redstate.com/2015/04/07/sabri...ake-rape-story/

Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s OTHER Possibly Fake Rape Story

One of the painful things the New Republic was forced to undertake when it first came to light that reporter Stephen Glass had fabricated certain details of his stories was to go over all his stories with a fine toothed comb to determine exactly how systemic the problem had been with Glass’s reporting. After all, a reporter who faked details in one or two stories might well have done so in others. To TNR’s credit, they promptly performed an exhaustive, line-by-line review of each of Glass’s stories over the years and laid bare the gruesome results for the world to see, exposing that the infractions for which Glass was eventually caught were only the tip of the iceberg, and that fabulist reporting by Glass was the rule, not the exception.


By way of contrast, in the wake of a damning CJR report on the reporting practices of Sabrina Rubin Erdely and the editorial and fact checking practices of Rolling Stone, Rolling Stone has shown absolutely no inclination to engage in a similar soul searching over whether Ms. Erdely might have engaged in similarly shoddy reporting in the past, and whether such shoddy reporting (if it exists) might have slipped through their fact checking and editorial system. Ms. Erdely by all appearances has not been professionally disciplined at all for her blunders and the Rolling Stone brass is acting as though this is an isolated incident in which they were blameless victims of an exceptionally clever con artist.

It turns out, Erdely may have been guilty of the same journalistic errors she committed in reporting the UVA rape story on at least one other rape story that garnered national attention at the time. The story in question was published in 2013 and was titled “The Rape of Petty Officer Blumer.”

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much more!
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Oh dear! This story was so delicious it did NOT WARRANT EVEN A SINGLE FACT CHECK PHONE CALL to those accused! It's the Dan Rather TANG model of 'fake but accurate' journalism. The ideologues will lunge forward for the sensational effect and then when contrary things surface and blow up as they did here, they circle the wagons to protect their minions and the agenda. TM

Quote: Frank Cannon wrote in post #3

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Does anyone really care anymore about what Rolling Stone does or doesn't do or who they fire? They are finished as a Left Wing hit piece generator. Every story they print from now on will have a built in cloud of lies. Even Leftists will be afraid to cite them for even a album review anymore.

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