Shots in the Dark

On the Daily Beast yesterday, Liz Seccuro published a long account of her rape at UVa in 1984. I have grown a little cynical about Seccuro since, hours before the Washington Post published its first debunking of Jackie’s story of gang rape, she published an article on Time.com explaining why you should never question a “rape survivor“—and has since steadfastly refused to acknowledge just how wrong she was—on -the premise, I suppose, that if you never admit that you were wrong, people will eventually just…forget that you were wrong.

But no matter—her story on the Daily Beast is painful and disturbing to read, and good on her for going public with this traumatic experience. You can buy her book here.

My issue is with the Daily Beast, which set up Seccuro’s story like this:

HISTORY REPEATING 12.16.14

I Was Gang Raped at a U-VA Frat 30 Years Ago, and No One Did Anything

History repeating?

I thought at first that maybe that’s some clever description—a slug, you’d call it in the magazine biz—the Daily Beast uses to introduce personal memoirs. But I searched the site for that phrase and couldn’t find any other usage of it as a slug. It’s possible that I wasn’t able to search the site correctly. It’s also possible that I’m just over-interpreting this.

But…it does appear like “HISTORY REPEATING” is a reference to Jackie’s claim that she was gang-raped at UVa.

If so, that’s an odd bit of editorializing; we still have no idea what, if anything, happened to Jackie. (And more and more, I doubt that we ever will.)

There’s some support for this interpretation to be found in an editor’s note at the bottom of the page:

Editor’s note: Liz’s account of her rape was briefly recounted in the November 17th issue of Rolling Stone, in the story ‘A Rape on Campus’ by Sabrina Rubin Erdely.

Liz is the author of Crash Into Me: A Survivor’s Search for Justice.

Just so you know, editor’s notes do not typically refer to their writers by their first names; if I wrote something for the Daily Beast, you can be sure that the tagline might say something like, “Richard Bradley is the author of….” It would not say, “Richard is the author of…”

Using Seccuro’s first name suggests a sort of editorial intimacy with the writer —a friendship, almost—that I would think inappropriate in anything other than a teenage girls’ magazine. I can guarantee you that Newsweek, the former owner of the Daily Beast, would not refer to a writer by her first name.

What’s the point? That this is unprofessional behavior on the part of editors because they want to show empathy with a woman who is recounting a story of rape. I understand the impulse, but it’s the same sort of mentality that got Rolling Stone into trouble.

Given what’s happened in the past couple of weeks, one would hope that the Daily Beast would know better. But in recent years, in an attempt to solidify its financial standing, the site has gone into the business of developing conferences aimed at women, and I imagine this kind of “we’re all part of the sisterhood” mentality is part of that financial agenda. Don’t be surprised if “Liz” is speaking on a Daily Beast panel sometime soon….

UPDATE: The word “former” was added to the sentence beginning “I can guarantee you…” to reflect the fact that Newsweek no longer owns the Daily Beast and, frankly, I’m not even sure if Newsweek still exists.

New York Magazine’s Jessica Pressler wrote a pretty long story this week about a New York high school kid who made tens of millions of dollars in the stock market.

Mo, a cherubic senior with a goatee and slight faux-hawk, smiled shyly. “He’s quiet today,” said Patrick Trablusi, who was seated with Mo and Damir at a table littered with empty glasses. “Humble.” And tired: “This is our third meeting of the day,” Damir said, signaling to the waitress for another round. “We saw a real-estate agent, a lawyer, you …”

“He basically wants to give us $150 million,” Mo explained, a blush like a sunset creeping over his cheeks.

Perhaps that giggling should have told Ms. Pressler something—like, they were laughing at her—because it turns out that the story is fake.

A blush like a sunset creeping over his cheeks…

According to the New York Observer,

Monday’s edition of New York magazine includes an irresistible story about a Stuyvesant High senior named Mohammed Islam who had made a fortune investing in the stock market. Reporter Jessica Pressler wrote regarding the precise number, “Though he is shy about the $72 million number, he confirmed his net worth is in the “’high eight figures.’”

…now it turns out, the real number is … zero.

In an exclusive interview with Mr. Islam and his friend Damir Tulemaganbetov, who also featured heavily in the New York story, the baby faced boys who dress in suits with tie clips came clean. Swept up in a tide of media adulation, they made the whole thing up.

As the Observer points out,

Even if this working-class kid had somehow started with $100,000 as a high school freshman on day one at Stuy High, he’d have needed to average a compounded annualized return of something like 796% over the three years since. C’mon, man.

Well, first things first: Jessica Pressler, whom I’ve never met or spoken to, once took a gratuitous cheap shot at me for no reason other than being snarky. As words go, snark and karma have a lot in common.

More important, whether it’s with Jezebel or New York magazine, we’re seeing a generation of writers who simply haven’t learned to report. They grew up writing for blogs, where snark generates hits, which generates attention—and in the short term, that’s good for your career. Eventually, it catches up to you…call it “snarkarma.”

I mean, this is basic business reporting. This kid wasn’t even old enough to open a brokerage account, and Pressler has him generating an 800 percent annual return.

Pressler, by the way, has “protected” her tweets, so that if you’re not following her you can’t see them—another example of journalists who, when it comes to transparency, don’t practice what they preach….

But before she went Twitter-silent, Pressler tweeted, according to the New York Times, “It’s New York mag’s Reasons to Love issue, we’re not a financial publication.”

So that’s okay then.

New York has added a pretty mealy-mouthed “editor’s note” saying that they were really writing about a “rumor.”

…Our story portrays the $72 million figure as a rumor; the initial headline has been changed to more clearly reflect the fact that we did not know the exact figure he has made in trades….

Whether it’s Rolling Stone, Sabrina Rubin Erdely or Jessica Pressler, why is it so hard for people to admit when they’re wrong? The idea that New York magazine “is not a financial publication”—and by the way, New York does cover finance quite a lot—and that mitigates the idiocy of publishing this story is just so facile and morally irresponsible.

Ms. Pressler, by the way, is moving to Bloomberg next year to join the “financial investigative unit.”

According to Capital New York,

“I hear that when you go to Bloomberg, after you’ve been there a year, they give you a magazine that you can run into the ground,” said Pressler, jokingly (we think!).

I’m sure Bloomberg is feeling pretty good about their new hire right now.

In an email to the Washington Post, Pressler maintained her sassier-than-thou attitude.

“I’m I guess moderately surprised. In my day (2008?) it took at least a few days to cop to a fraud. I have to talk to nymag before officially comments as the story’s really theirs.”

The story’s really theirs? Way to own your work, Jessica.

The Post’s Terrence McCoy adds,

…how was he able to convince a reporter into thinking those returns had not only been real — but that he was worth “high eight figures?” A source close to the Islam family who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue told The Post Islam had “created some bulls—t thing on the computer with blacked out numbers. He said she could look at it for 10 seconds, and pulled it away.” The Washington Post couldn’t independently verify that claim.

The “she” here actually may refer to a fact-checker—the NY Mag editor’s note suggests as much—meaning that Pressler never even bothered to try to verify the young man’s claim; she just left it up to the fact checker. Hey, why not—the story’s really theirs, anyway!

By the way—has anyone ever seen Anna Merlan and Jessica Pressler in the same room?

The faces of snark: Jessica Pressler and Anna Merlan

Update: New York has amended its editor’s note, which now reads, in part: We were duped. Our fact-checking process was obviously inadequate; we take full responsibility and we should have known better. New York apologizes to our readers..

Interviewed by Brian Stelter of CNN, UVa rape survivor Alex Pinkleton says that Sabrina Rubin Erdely had a blatant ant-fraternity bias, and that her questions seemed crafted to make fraternities look bad.

According to (surprise, surprise) Erik Wemple, who writes about the interview in the Post, Pinkleton said,

…[Rubin Erdely] did have an agenda and part of that agenda was showing how monstrous fraternities themselves as an institution are and blaming the administration for a lot of these sexual assaults.”

Pinkleton noticed a certain tendency in the reporter: “When she asked about my own assault, she kept asking, you know, ‘Did he feed you the drinks, was he keeping tabs of the drinks that night?’ ” Pinkleton told Stelter. “And he wasn’t and that’s something that I had to keep saying over and over again. And I felt that she wasn’t satisfied with my perpetrator as someone who wasn’t clearly monstrous.”

That is ghastly-if you’re being interviewed by someone and they are so determined to twist your answer or hear something that you’re not saying that you have “to keep saying it over and over again.” In the journalism world, that is a three-alarm fire.

Pinkleton later added, “I didn’t like that it seemed like she was looking for a story that had to be at a fraternity.”

That is not going to help Rubin Erdely defend herself in any legal action…

It’s worth pointing out that Pinkleton still believes that “something traumatic happened to [Jackie] that night,” adding that “some of the details we’re finding out may have some discrepancies due to trauma—that’s something that comes along with being a survivor…. One thing that she might have done is try to fill in the blanks herself and might have filled it in with something that isn’t quote-unquote ‘true.’ But it’s something that she believes may have happened to her that night…”

“Quote-unquote true”….George Orwell just did a 360.

I don’t mean to fault Pinkleton; she seems like a level-headed and impressive young woman, and as a rape survivor, she’s obviously going to stand up for her friend—”my job as an advocate was never to question Jackie’ story,” she admits, and fair enough. She also articulates a far more nuanced view of sexual assault on campus than you will find in Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s piece.

But as I’ve pointed out before, the distance between being forced to perform oral sex on five men, as horrible as that is—and assuming that it’s true—and being vaginally raped by seven men over the course of three hours seems to stretch the definition of the word “discrepancies.” Especially because, according to her friends, Jackie told them the forced oral sex story immediately after it happened—which, if that story were true, suggests that she was telling the truth and then, years later, “discrepancies” crept in to her account. To me, it’s hard to explain those discrepancies as the result of trauma—especially if you got the story right the first time.

Pinkleton adds, by the way, that Rubin Erdely has gotten back in touch with her since the publication of the story. “I haven’t responded,” she says. She explains that she’s in the middle of exams and doesn’t have a lot of time to talk with her—an excuse that seems less than credible given the fact that she’s giving a lengthy television interview as she says it.

Update: I meant to add that after reading Wemple’s article, I went and watched the video, and thought that Brian Stelter did a very nice job of interviewing Pinkleton—polite and sensitive about some difficult subjects, but asking all the right questions.

In today’s paper, NYT media critic David Carr writes a long and pointless piece about pot-stirring, Jackie-doxxing blogger Charles C. Johnson.

He concludes with these words: My worry is that people who have made it this far in the column will click over to GotNews to see what all the fuss is about.

If that’s how you feel, why write the profile at all?

Especially because a) the Washington Post already did it last week, and b) it’s not as if the Times has exactly excelled in its reporting of Rolling Stone’s bogus UVa rape article. There is plenty of other work the Times’ media columnist could be doing.

Nobody likes to criticize David Carr because he has a lot of friends in the media and because he is powerful. And also because he has done such a good job promoting his story of drug addiction that he’s created a sort of triumphant-victim persona for himself.

But I’m never going to work at the New York Times, so…why not?

This piece feels lazy, the work of a guy who’s been scooped by a blogger (yours truly) and a metro reporter, T. Rees Shapiro, and Hanna Rosin, among others, and has reached the point in his career where getting scooped doesn’t really bother him—the “I’d rather be a pundit” phase; Carr now spends two days a week teaching at Boston University. Carr also spends a lot of time going to conferences—TechCrunch, South by Southwest, the ANA Brand Conference, the Chicago Humanities Festival, Internet Week New York, the Harvard Kennedy School, or giving the 2012 Mary Alice Davis Distinguished Lecture at U.T.-Austin or the UC-Berekely J. School’s 2014 commencement address or—well, you get the point. You have to wonder if all this outside activity takes away from his time to actually, you know, report. Or maybe he just thinks that he’s too grand to travel to Charlottesville and knock on doors.

David Carr, I should add, once wrote a piece about me which I didn’t think was particularly fair but wasn’t the worst. That was about ten years ago. What struck me at the time really was how under-reported it was. Carr had lunch with me for about an hour, then made a few phone calls to other people and that was it. The profile of Chuck Johnson seems even less reported: It appears to be based entirely on one phone call with Johnson, and the rest is filler—Carr opining. This is the slapdash work of a reporter who is overcommitted, burned-out, lazy or some combination of the above. (A not uncommon problem among Times columnists, to be fair.) Carr is going through the motions.

What frustrates me about today’s piece goes beyond the fact that it’s odd to write about Chuck Johnson and then add the caveat that you don’t want Chuck Johnson to get any more publicity. There’s an MSM/NYT arrogance there: The only thing you need to know about this guy is what I’m telling you.

But the real loss is that there is a really interesting social media story to be written about the collapse of Rolling Stone’s article: The part that social media played in undercutting a story that the mainstream media left unquestioned for weeks.

Yes, of course, that’s a self-serving thing to say, I concede that, but it’s truly not why I make the suggestion—I just think it’s a more interesting story than “Chuck Johnson is a scumbag, so read my column and not his blog.”

And there are plenty more people who could and should be included in a discussion of online criticism of Rolling Stone’s story: Robbie Soave, Steve Sailer and others, I’m sure. You could even include the role that Anna Merlan and others of her political leaning played.

Of course, that would have required Carr to make more than one phone call.

And that’s an article that would make the establishment media look bad. And Carr—who, once upon a time, used to write for Washington City Paper, a terrific alternative weekly in D.C.—really does see himself as the voice from Mount Olympus these days. “[Johnson] is not without some talent,” Carr writes.

So it is not surprising that The Times’ media reporter chose to write a piece that makes bloggers look bad. But it is a missed opportunity…as is all the Times’ coverage of what’s going on at UVa.

Kathryn Hendley, Alex Stock and Ryan Duffin—the three friends of Jackie’s who Sabrina Rubin Erdely falsely claimed discouraged from her calling the authorities—now tell the AP that they have all been contacted by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, who is “re-reporting” her original story.

All three say Erdely has since reached out to them, and that she has told them she is re-reporting the story. Hendley told the AP Erdely apologized to her for portraying her the way she did.

This is a bizarre idea for a number of reasons.

First, Rubin Erdely herself continues to refuse to talk to the press—or, as she said of the UVa administration, she is “stonewalling.” So she is a hypocrite.

And second—why on earth would anyone talk to her? (The AP story does not disclose whether the three friends agreed to be re-interviewed interviewed.) She revealed her profound political bias in her first article, as well as a fatal lack of professionalism. She might improve on the second part, but she’s unlikely to change the first. In fact, she might be even more invested in proving the point that, whatever happened to Jackie, there is a larger “rape culture” at the University of Virginia.

But most important, Rubin Erdely is deeply compromised by her original shoddy reporting, and she is now part of this story; it makes no sense for her to be a part of “re-reporting” it. What if she subsequently writes that Jackie made the whole thing up? That would obviously be to her benefit—and we couldn’t possibly believe it. Apologizing to Kathryn Hendley is a decent thing to do, but at this point, it’s also a way to fend off a lawsuit. Remember, Rubin Erdely called Hendley a “self-declared hookup slut queen” who told Jackie not to go to the authorities lest she (Hendley) never get invited to a fraternity party again.

However, Hendley told the AP that not only did she not say any of that, she had arrived with Stock to the picnic table only to have Jackie say she didn’t want her to be part of the conversation. She said she watched from afar while Stock and Duffin talked with Jackie.

Anything and everything that Sabrina Rubin Erdely reports on at UVa would now directly affect her; anything she might produce under such circumstances shouldn’t be trusted any more than her original article.

I suspect that Rubin Erdely is doing this on her own; if you’re Rolling Stone, there’s no way you want her making telephone calls and representing your magazine now. But then, Rolling Stone too says it is “re-reporting” the story. And Rolling Stone has done a lot of stupid things over the past few months.

By the way, “re-reporting” is not a common or even known term in journalism, and here’s why: You can’t “re-report” a thing, because as soon as you write about it the first time, you change it; the word suggests that a situation is static, but it is the opposite.

There’s at least one reporter—the Washington Post’s T. Rees Shapiro—down in Charlottesville trying to find out what really happened. Judging from what he’s printed, and from what I’ve seen of him on television, he seems like a serious guy; the TV interviewers keep trying to get him to speak beyond the scope of his reporting, and he keeps limiting his answers only to what he knows for sure. That’s smart—and responsible.

Rubin Erdely should let other reporters do the job at which she failed. Instead, she should be busy writing an apology—and, in my opinion, a resume.

Because it raises an important argument that we’ll be hearing a lot of in the next few days…and that I intend to challenge as soon as time permits.

Yes, I am on Twitter: RPBradley1.

Someone else—a jeweler, I think—took RichardBradley. My bad for not being an early adopter.

For those of you who are new to the blog, one small point about commenting: I’m a pretty light moderator. Steer clear of meanness and you can say pretty much whatever you want.

And if you include a link, I have to “approve” the comment before it appears. That’s to avoid spam comments, of which I used to get a ton. So don’t worry if your comment doesn’t instantly appear.

I first started writing this blog back in 2005 to help promote and discuss a book I had just written, “Harvard Rules,” which was about Lawrence Summer’s failed presidency at Harvard. (Still available—cheap!—on Amazon.)

I still write often on Harvard-related issues, but I’ve broadened the blog into a forum for discussion of culture, sports (Yankees good/Red Sox boo), politics and pop music, usually from the 1980s.

I have covered the issue of sexual assault on campus, as well as bogus journalism, fairly consistently over the past few years. I defended Woody Allen and Patrick Witt; not so much Nicholas Kristof. And, if I were to write about him, I would certainly not defend Bill Cosby.

So you may actually see some posts from time to time that have nothing to do with Sabrina Rubin Erdley, Jackie or Rolling Stone.

It has been a week since the original Washington Post story which drew key aspects of Rubin Erdely’s Rolling Stone article into question. In that time, “A Rape on Campus” has only become more discredited. There is reason to suspect that both Jackie and Rubin Erdely have concocted deceptions.

Also in that time, we have not heard a public word from the author of this fatally flawed and irresponsible magazine article. She appears to have taken down her Facebook page has not posted on her Facebook page and deleted her Twitter account has gone dark. She has not responded to media inquiries; she has not made any kind of statement.

Where is she—Bermuda?

Let’s suppose that there are two possible reasons why Rubin Erdely has gone underground.

1) She is depressed.
2) Her/Rolling Stone’s lawyers have told her to say nothing.

I’m sure the first is true to some degree—and let us hope that it’s nothing serious—but I expect #2 is the predominant reason.

Whatever the cause, Rubin Erdely’s mysterious silence is disappointing. As I’ve pointed out before, she was more than happy to enjoy the perks of publicity back when people believed her story.

Now, she’s avoiding responsibility.

You can’t have it both ways, reveling in praise when things are going well and then running away when it all heads south.

Because this story isn’t just about her. It has caused hurt, pain, anger, division and controversy; it has set back the cause—in her words, “upend[ing] the patriarchy”—which was her motivation for writing the story in the first place. (Well, that and professional advancement.)

No matter how depressed she may be…no matter what the lawyers are telling her…Sabrina Rubin Erdely needs to man up do the right thing. If her lawyers are telling her to lay low, she should tell them to stuff it. It’s time for her to take responsibility for the chaos for which she is primarily responsible.

(FWIW, I think the phrase “man up” has become a gender-neutral term for taking responsibility. But I can understand why others might disagree, and I don’t want to distract from the point, so I changed the language.)

Last Friday, Rolling Stone put out a statement backing off Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s story, “A Rape on Campus,” and the account of its protagonist, a young woman named Jackie.

“There now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie’s account,” the magazine said.

That was an artfully chosen term. The magazine didn’t know if Jackie had lied to them or misremembered what happened to her; the magazine couldn’t really say for sure if anything at all had happened to Jackie.

Hence the use of the term discrepancies; it is a vague and legalistic word that can mean very little or an enormous amount. And people on both extremes of the discussion about Jackie’s story have tried to define it.

Mostly from the right, some observers believe that the term “discrepancies” suggests that nothing happened to Jackie; that she made the whole thing up. Some websites have alleged—without a hint of proof, as far as I can tell— that Jackie has a history of making up rape allegations. These are the same folks who are livid with Rolling Stone for not holding Jackie to the highest evidentiary standards. I certainly understand the criticism, but some consistency would seem to be in order.

On the other side, the victims’ advocacy wing, there are people who keep writing about “discrepancies” as if they are by definition trivial.

The context is usually something like this: “Just because there are inconsistencies in Jackie’s story does not mean that it isn’t mostly true. So what if she got the date wrong, or the name of the fraternity? Something happened to her.”

To these people I would say, let’s not forget what Jackie’s original story was: a premeditated gang rape; nine men in a pitch-black room; rape by seven of them, the last with a beer bottle; three best friends who discouraged her from reporting the rape for fear they’d never be invited to fraternity parties.

Even if there are “discrepancies” in Jackie’s story, we are still left, frankly, with a fantastical story. The argument thus becomes: So what if she got the name of the fraternity wrong? That doesn’t disprove that she was the victim of a premeditated gang rape in a blackened fraternity room by seven men!

“So what if it didn’t happen just the way she said it? She was still forced to perform oral sex on five men!”

Like this writer for the Huffington Post, who says, “Just Because Rolling Stone Got Jackie’s Story Wrong Doesn’t Mean It Is a Hoax.”

Or this writer for the International Business Times: “Why ‘Discepancies’ in Rolling Stone Rape Story Don’t Mean ‘Jackie’ Is Lying.”

Yet the forced oral sex scenario is also an incredible story that, while it could be true, must be viewed with some skepticism.

For me the challenge has always been: How do you get from something that seems plausible—a rape at a fraternity—to forced oral sex around a circle of five or gang rape by seven men? The leap from the former to the latter does not require simply getting a few details wrong; it involves the invention of dramatic and specific scenarios.

And that doesn’t suggest “discrepancies”—again, Rolling Stone’s term to explain things just not adding up—but “fabrications.” You can’t exaggerate or misremember your way to gang rape. It either happened or it didn’t.

Which brings me to a Washington Post story by T. Rees Shapiro, just posted about an hour ago, which, I think, is going to have an enormous impact.

Rees interviews Jackie’s three friends—the three friends whom, we now know, Sabrina Rubin Erdely did not even try to interview—and they tell a wildly different story of that night than Rubin Erdely recounted in her article.

In their first interviews about the events of that September 2012 night, the three friends separately told The Post that their recollections of the encounter diverge from how Rolling Stone portrayed the incident in a story about Jackie’s alleged gang rape at a U-Va. fraternity. The interviews also provide a richer account of Jackie’s interactions immediately after the alleged attack, and suggest that the friends are skeptical of her account.

It gets worse for Jackie—and Sabrina Rubin Erdely, who now appears to have lied when she said that “Randall” would not speak to her “out of loyalty to his frat.” (Randall tells the Post that Rolling Stone never contacted him—and that he would have spoken to Rubin Erdely if she had. Rubin Erdely, if you had a career left—now you don’t.)

But here’s where the plot really thickens:

[The three friends] said there are mounting inconsistencies with the original narrative in the magazine. The students also expressed suspicions about Jackie’s allegations from that night. They said the name she provided as that of her date did not match anyone at the university, and U-Va. officials confirmed to The Post that no one by that name has attended the school.

The narrative they tell is a bit confusing, and I won’t recount it here, but let me be blunt:

It is getting very hard not to think that Jackie has not invented much or most of this story out of whole cloth.

It it also getting very hard not to think that Sabrina Rubin Erdely may have made up some crucial details of her article to fit her political agenda.

In short: This may be a situation where both the writer and the subject of the story have lied.

If you thought this was messy before, it’s about to get much, much worse. We are way past “discrepancies” now.

The New York Observer’s Ken Kurson finds a source who tells the paper that at least one editor at Rolling Stone, deputy managing editor Sean Woods, has offered his resignation—and that editor-in-chief and owner Jann Wenner has turned it down.

Wenner denies the report, but I suspect that Wenner would deny it regardless of its veracity. (Kurson finds a second source to confirm it.)

According to the source, Rolling Stone is right now planning to assemble a “re-reporting project” akin to the one the New York Times put together in the wake of the Jayson Blair fabulism scandal that will head to UVa both to sort through the errors of the story and to tell readers what actually happened.

Good luck with that—you can’t possibly do accurate reporting given everything that’s happened: It’s like stirring up the muck at the bottom of a crystal clear pond and then trying to see your reflection. And can you imagine going down to the U.Va. campus now and saying, “Hi—I’m a reporter from Rolling Stone magazine…” I mean-do you think Jackie’s going to talk to them? her friends? The fraternity members?

Me neither.

Here’s a section of the article that doesn’t make much sense to me:

What about the fact-checking?

The source knows Rolling Stone Senior Editor/Head Factchecker Coco McPherson well and claims that she is a “stickler who errs on the side of caution,” a claim backed up by Mr. [Matt] Taibbi, who remarked that the process is so intense “it usually takes longer to fact-check a Rolling Stone feature than it does to write it. Each review is like an IRS audit.”

But any fact-checker that good would raise a dozen red flags with this story. Which means that either McPherson isn’t as good as they say, or she raised concerns and they were overruled.

My guess: Coco McPherson was blinded by ideology; like Sabrina Rubin Erdely, she wanted to believe in this story. What makes me say this? McPherson’s tweet of November 20th:

So proud of @SabrinaRErdely and @RollingStone and the incredibly brave young women of UVA for coming forward http://rol.st/11Cs0z8

Never mind that the central woman in the story did not actually “come forward.” That tweet—”so proud”—is the tweet of an advocate and a cheerleader, not a fact checker. If you are so proud of these women merely for speaking anonymously to your magazine, are you really going to look at them with your most critical eye?

The Observer indirectly touches on this point, writing:

The Observer raised an idea that has been mentioned in some corners of the press”—i.e., this blog——”that Rolling Stone was credulous about such an intense story because from factcheckers to editors to writers they are predisposed to believe the worst about fraternity brothers at an elite university. Indeed, Ms. McPherson initially defended the story and its methods, taking to Twitter to point to an example in which other news organizations did not identify or interview alleged campus rapists.

The tweet in question refers to a New York Times story about an alleged sexual assault at Columbia; the description of the assault is vague, and you couldn’t possibly identify an alleged attacker from it. It is not even close to analogous to Rolling Stone’s story.

McPherson also retweeted this (combined) tweet from Rolling Stone writer Tim Dickinson:

…I’m appalled that people are turning a story about a public institution sitting on an explosive allegation of gang rape on campus into a conversation about ethics in gang-rape journalism.

The Observer’s Kurson adds that his source “wasn’t buying that “predisposition [to believe]….”

Nonsense. You have a deeply compromised fact-checker who’s “proud” of the “incredibly brave young women of UVA;” a fact checker who is “appalled” that anyone would ask legitimate questions about the slipshod reporting of a very sensitive story.

You have editors who have bought into the ideology that you never question a woman who says she’s been raped—an ideology that, while it may be valid for friends and counselors, has nothing to do with the conduct of journalism. And as a result, they compromised the most basic rules of the craft—things you wouldn’t do on your high school paper.

And you have a writer who went searching for just the right campus on which to “upend the patriarchy.” On the same day that CoCo McPherson sent out her pride tweet, Sabrina Rubin Erdely tweeted:

Nov 20
I’ve passed along your msgs of strength to Jackie. I know she appreciates it. Awed by her bravery & that of all the Uva women who spoke out.

It’s just one big lovefest between the women of UVA and the staff of Rolling Stone.

So don’t tell me that there wasn’t a predisposition to believe this story. That is self-delusional bunk, the kind of lazy, uncritical thinking that got Rolling Stone into this mess in the first place.