Responding Soon
Posted on April 6th, 2015 in Uncategorized | 137 Comments »
Thanks for all the feedback about the release of Columbia Journalism School report on the Rolling Stone fiasco.
I’m taking some time to read the report carefully—it’s long!—and will post some reactions shortly.
137 Responses
4/6/2024 9:18 am
We definitely need your take Richard: but one question, how, given the scathing nature of the report, could absolutely no one get fired or be disciplined? Sort of like, sorry we made lots of mistakes on this, but we won’t do it again, promise - type of logic, which seems mind boggling. Any thoughts you’d have would be appreciated…..
4/6/2024 9:31 am
Thank you.
And as eager as many are to hear what you have to say you are wise to keep your counsel.
As for me, I find it woefully inadequate. No reference at all to the largely apocryphal verses of Rugby Road being cleverly interspersed through the story? A reference to Erdely thinking that UVa officials were stonewalling, but that a victim who would not name 3 corroborating witnesses was not stonewalling?
A characterization of Jackie being from “rural Virginia” (and insinuation that she was some naive damsel) when she is from Stafford County, which has the country’s sixth highest median income and is squarely in DC’s exurbia to the point that commuter trains serve it?
And an overall, almost contemptuous characterization of UVa as an overwhelmingly blond (huh?) rather conformist school which, shame on them, has no slut walks?
And what is up with her apology referring to “U.V.A.”? I cannot fathom how, afer ll of her time in Charlottesville and the familiarity she developed that NO ONE uses that inaacurate acronym.
It is the least of her errors, but it leaves me to wonder just who drafted the apology.
4/6/2024 9:35 am
Since you are reviewing this now, I don’t mean to be harsh but I want ask you are you embarrassed by what your profession has become. How can they not fire anyone. It seems more an more it is all about the narrative and not about the truth. I mean Erdey was teaching journalism for god’s sake. Why aren’t more reporters screaming about this? Don’t they not understand that allowing this lady to continue in this profession affects the perception of journalism itself?
I would compare it to the Steroid era in Baseball, even though not every player used them during this time, everyone that played in that error is suspect.
4/6/2024 9:45 am
As for me, I find it woefully inadequate.
I second this. There is literally no mention in the CJR article that certain details are so wildly implausible any reporter should have known instantly they could not be believed without unassailable proof. I was directed to the article via a (supportive) blog reference and knew the story as reported was false before I was halfway through - and wrote so on the web an hour later.
The CJR article focuses on processes that would have uncovered the fraud. But fails to note that the reporter and editor should have been highly suspicious from the beginning, and thus their process lapses are inexplicable given the context.
4/6/2024 9:48 am
Given what we’ve all known for months (largely starting with you Richard) I’ve found myself interested in something entirely different.
Apparently Erderly worked on this for 6 months. With income and expenses there’s likely no change out of $100k on that. And this is supposed to be the very peak of American journalism, the long form investigation by the very best into the society. And what it actually managed to come up with was an investigation into a social hysteria akin to Salem or Satanic abuse cases. The social hysteria being among the accusers and journalists of course.
Because seriously, the basic allegation was that the upper middle class boys of America who tend to go into frats have gang rape as an induction routine. Seriously?
Two things flow from this. The first is, well, being in the grips of this sort of social hysteria isn’t all that great for business. And secondly, 6 months? How about 3 days by the local crime desk reporter as being about the right amount of effort to expend upon such an allegation?
No wonder American journalism has its economic problems these days.
4/6/2024 9:49 am
CJR forgot to mention Jackie lied.
4/6/2024 9:49 am
Tim,
Are you saying Sabrina was paid $100k for the article?
4/6/2024 9:52 am
Thoughts on why her apology did not include a reference to Phi Psi, the frat she accused of ritualized gang rape? Maybe for legal reasons? Seemed to be a notable omission.
4/6/2024 10:02 am
@ Erdely’s Apology
As noted above, the innacurate reference to “U.V.A.” not “U.Va.” or “UVA” or, as would be due an apoogy, “The Uviversity of Virginia” leads me to think the apology was drafted by some unholy combination of lawyers and PR folks whose familiarity with abbreviation conventions were inferior to Erdely’s.
No way anyone who has spent even a week in C’Ville would write “U.V.A.”
4/6/2024 10:03 am
Is Rolling Stone asking for their money back (from Erdley)?
4/6/2024 10:03 am
The three things that jumped out at me from the report:
1. SRE had all of her files turned over to RS, and they show that all the details of the story (rape on broken glass, Blanket ‘n’ Armpit, etc.) came from Jackie.
2. SRE worked on this for 6 months but appears to have done the bulk of her “research” via emails and phone calls. In fact, it doesn’t even look like she went to UVA until September.
3. Emily Renda’s congressional reference to this spurious rape was taken as proof that the rape happened, both by SRE and her editor. Renda, in turn, was the source that led to Jackie.
SRE cannot be fired as far as I know, she’s a freelancer.
4/6/2024 10:08 am
Programming Note:
12 p.m. (EST) Press Conference at Columbia
4/6/2024 10:14 am
LIVE Press Conference:
(12 pm):
bit.ly [slash] cjslive
4/6/2024 10:21 am
One caveat -
While I find the evaluation inadequate, before CJS’s is accused of being responsible for the inadequacy, one should determine just what CJS was retained to evaluate.
It mat very well be that CJS’s effort fairly satisfies what it was charged to perform.
4/6/2024 10:24 am
“SRE cannot be fired as far as I know, she’s a freelancer.”
You can “fire” her by no longer having her write for your magazine. You’d think that would be the absolute LEAST Wenner could do if he were interested in restoring RS’s credibility to the same level once enjoyed by Weekly World News.
4/6/2024 10:36 am
“Tim,
Are you saying Sabrina was paid $100k for the article?”
Oh good grief no. Only that add expenses etc to what you’d be paying for 6 months of someone like that’s time and a bit of management overhead and you would be talking about a total budget of around that number.
They absolutely would not be talking about $1 a word for that 10,000 word piece.
4/6/2024 10:43 am
Why is no one being fired? My guess is that RS is is fearful of the backlash that would come from certain *cough cough* circles for firing Erdley over this story. You know, the same “circles” who either cling to the idea that this claim was true, or insist that the truth and a few frat boys are a small sacrifice for their aims.
4/6/2024 10:53 am
And where is the outrage over Jann Wenner calling Jackie a fabulist in the NYT? Hanna Rosin over at Slate says he almost called her a liar… it seems liberals will only go so far in criticizing one of their own.
4/6/2024 11:01 am
I too am looking forward to Richard’s analysis. I thought CSJ might comment on Rolling Stone’s tendency to take an “us vs them” approach to their stories (not just this one) where they seem to stray more into advocacy (i.e. cherry picking narratives and not really trying to fully inform the reader). Perhaps that approach is so common in media these days that ship has already sailed.
The other thing that made me laugh was Emily Renda’s email to Erdely
On July 14, Emily Renda, who had graduated in May and taken a job in the university’s student affairs office, told the reporter that it might be unwise for Rolling Stone to name Phi Kappa Psi in its story because “there are two other women who have not come forward fully yet, and we are trying to persuade them to get punitive action against the fraternity.”
“come forward fully… we are trying to persuade them???” That implies that they came forward to some degree. What an absolutely massive mis-characterization of the facts that were known (that Jackie was THE ONLY source of this information).
4/6/2024 11:02 am
Everything RS does at this point is in anticipation of legal action. The article slandered every single member of Phi Psi (if slander is the right word for an accusation of gang rape), it slandered Jackie’s friends and it slandered the UVA administration. Firing the responsible parties could be seen as further admission of guilt, so instead RS circles the wagons and claims nothing was done wrong
4/6/2024 11:16 am
“In retrospect, I wish somebody had pushed me harder” about reaching out to the three for their versions, Erdely said. “I guess maybe I was surprised that nobody said, ‘Why haven’t you called them?’ But nobody did, and I wasn’t going to press that issue.”
Is Erdely an adult? She claims she has to be pushed to perform standard requirements for her job? What else does she have to be prodded to do? Juvenile, blame-shifting to editors and her subject, and complete absence of empathy towards her real victims. I would suggest her mental and social age is 12. And she is a hazard to herself and others.
4/6/2024 11:20 am
That bit about Rolling Stone’s in-house lawyers citing “attorney-client privilege” as the reason that they would not talk to Columbia’s people about their vetting of the story …
Why didn’t RS waive the privilege if they wanted to be forthcoming to the investigators?
4/6/2024 11:22 am
“Firing the responsible parties could be seen as further admission of guilt, so instead RS circles the wagons and claims nothing was done wrong.”
Keeping legally culpable staff on the payroll is standard practice when looking at lawsuits. They will lie for you because they are also lying for themselves. Firing them would send them over to rat you out to the plaintiffs. The rationalizing, lying to themselves, and butt covering provides a comforting psychological and business service to the boss. All of them are thinking how do I get another job and get out of here.
4/6/2024 11:27 am
“Why didn’t RS waive the privilege if they wanted to be forthcoming to the investigators?”
Because the media lawyers hired after the fact by RS vetted what each employee would tell CJS. They wrote a “narrative” and then worked out the parts to be played. It is very obvious that no attorneys viewed any part of the story before it was published. RS has cut their fact checkers so you think they are shelling out for legal advice? No way.
4/6/2024 11:28 am
“you think they are shelling out for legal advice? No way.”
If they did RS has grounds for malpractice.
4/6/2024 11:38 am
This group of memes is just a coverup — that the report is “scathing,” “damning” and “devastating,” and that Erdely and Rolling Stone “botched” the story.
You have to understand that some movements believe in lying. If people aren’t skeptical enough, or smart enough, to see past your lies, then that’s just nature taking its course, no more morally offensive than an animal camouflaging itself to attack prey more easily.
Erdely and RS got the exact story they wanted to push their agenda. In their eyes, the only crime was getting caught. I love the too-perfect part in the CJR paper about how, days after her article had been called into question and she’d gone into hiding, she suddenly realized that Jackie couldn’t spell Monahan and that’s when Erdely realized she’s been lying. Give me a break! That’s another lie.
And then no one fired! Anywhere! Surreal.
4/6/2024 11:44 am
Richard - only asking for fairness. Erderly made the mistake of judging the fraternities for a fictitious event made up by a very silly person with major psychological problems, huge speculations without adequate (or any) fact-based support, and generally pushing an agenda where it doesn’t belong. Erik Wemple at the Post has engaged in some of this, going all out in his bashing and sparing no quarter.
I think you’ve done the best job in calling a duck and duck and saying you can’t indict a system without doing a job thoroughly. Your process is thorough but fair. So seeing how all of this collapsed on itself will be really helpful - both examining why these ideas played so huge in the imagination (bad news sticks!) and why there was such a quick uptake of the accuser story, as well as why they decided to publish a bad story to begin with. If you can look at all the agendas I think you’ll get there.
Just my two cents. Remember…everyone commenting on this forum is a person and we have our biases too. Saying THROW OUT SULLIVAN is not so fact based - it’s a reaction and a perception that she didn’t do enough to protect the fraternities. But that might not be true and doesn’t seem to be. So if you can look at the ground truth, which by now is everywhere given Coll’s superb report and the police chief’s report, we’ll be way better for your view.
4/6/2024 11:47 am
great points everyone. Still think the Coll report is awesome. A case study in a screw up.
4/6/2024 11:50 am
…or covering the reporting of the aftermath - Shapiro, Wemple and other bloggers. Will be interesting to see how this plays out. Got to call a duck a duck…a true mess up.
4/6/2024 12:24 pm
Sullivan threw the fraternity, and all the students in it, and all Phi Psis everywhere, under the bus. She gleefully jumped on the “all Phi Psis are rapists” bandwagon. THESE WERE HER STUDENTS TOO. They had as much right to be protected as “Jackie” did, and their university president failed them utterly. She went along with the narrative that every single Phi Psi everywhere had taken part in gang rapes because it was a part of every brother’s initiation process. She completely sh*t on them.
Teresa Sullivan took the word of a music-and-drugs tabloid and, without any independent investigation of her own, punished the victims and stood by while they were subjected to mob justice. These were students under her care, and she betrayed them in the interests of politics and PR.
Sullivan must go. No male student is safe at that school while she’s still there.
4/6/2024 12:32 pm
“there are two other women who have not come forward fully yet, and we are trying to persuade them to get punitive action against the fraternity.”
Renda apparently told Erdely that there were three women with rape stories about this fraternity. They chimed in at a “rape survivor” meeting. None would go to the police. When this story was being offered to Erdely only Jackie bit. The other two wanted no part of a RS reporter. So it appears the meetings have many victims but few willing to officially report. Renda is the facilitator of the whole imbroglio and works for the university. She will be central in the development of the lawsuits.
4/6/2024 12:37 pm
“Renda is the facilitator of the whole imbroglio and works for the university.”
She’s also the White House/Obama administration tie-in. What are the chances of anyone in the media asking some tough questions about this “coincidence”? You know, committing a rare act of journalism?
4/6/2024 12:43 pm
Anonymous- You misunderstood. Charlottesville police were very clear. Only Jackie told UVA about the two other rape victims. Neither UVA nor the police were ever able to substantiate Jackie’s claim that their were two other victims. From what we now know, this is just another one of Jackie’s lies.
4/6/2024 12:46 pm
I don’t believe the characterization of Renda is quite accurate.
Erdely spoke to Renda who said there were three rape narratives. But the source for all three narratives was Jackie.
At the same time, Renda’s reference to these assaults to congress gave the assaults credibility to SRE and RS.
So I think it goes like this:
Jackie confabulated sexual assault and narrated it several times to (a) get a boyfriend, (b) explain her poor academic performance, (c) achieve status in women’s groups. She also narrated a (almost certainly false) narrative of assault with a beer bottle, and claimed to know of two other sexual assaults.
Emily Renda believed these stories and then made oblique references to them in Congressional testimony. At the same time, UVA and CPD also “believed” these stories to the extent of specifically asking Jackie about them.
When SRE asked Renda, Renda told her about the stories that several other parties “apparently” thought were true. Then SRE believed them because others appeared to believe them, which also enlarged the circle of believers. Then SRE’s editors believed them, because the circle of believers seemed to keep getting larger.
At no point did anyone say: Hey, wait a minute, what do we actually know to be true about these stories? No one ever called out Jackie to put up or shut up.
4/6/2024 12:59 pm
I read the report. Man, I thought that was actually pretty soft. It outlined the journalistic failings (which were legion) but didn’t even raise the ideological questions. Why were they so eager to believe this story? They would never have been so trusting if the accusation had been toward a sacred cow on the left. Never. And it is another scandal that the folks at Columbia are still unwilling to say the obvious: Jackie shares responsibility for this because she fabricated this story from whole cloth. The evidence is overwhelming.
4/6/2024 1:01 pm
“I love the too-perfect part in the CJR paper about how, days after her article had been called into question and she’d gone into hiding, she suddenly realized that Jackie couldn’t spell Monahan and that’s when Erdely realized she’s been lying. Give me a break! That’s another lie.”
LOL! I totally thought that when I read that part.. I mean.. Erdely BS detector didnt beep when she was told about sex over shatered glass, premeditated gang rape as a ritual, beer bottles flying around and being thrown at girls in public, or girl friends saying it could be quite nice to be raped by 7 hot phi psi guys
But then.. when Jackie can’t spell his last name.. all of sudden, she starts to doubt her story? COME ON!
And if Erdely was so conflicted about it.. why was she so confident and selling her story EVERYWHERE.. acting like a superstar, giving interviews and going to TV shows… and bragging about her methods and her due diligence?
4/6/2024 1:03 pm
“Teresa Sullivan took the word of a music-and-drugs tabloid and, without any independent investigation of her own, punished the victims and stood by while they were subjected to mob justice. These were students under her care, and she betrayed them in the interests of politics and PR.”
Nice cut-and-paste from Instapundit, other than not attributing it.
4/6/2024 1:09 pm
SPmoore8, excellent rundown but remember Renda ATTENDS the meetings of the group. She is one of the leaders and her forte. She is a sociologist grad not a psychiatrist. She would have heard it from the other horse’s mouths not just Jackie’s. It sounds like a game of telephone but they are also throwing dynamite. And UVa encouraged it with these “self help” groups with little or no supervision by adults or sane people.
4/6/2024 1:27 pm
Longo noted that Jackie had told UVA officials about two other cases of sexual assault at Phi Psi — one in 2010 and the other in 2014 — but that the police investigation did not find any further information about those alleged incidents.
Jackie is the ONLY source for the other two cases.
4/6/2024 1:30 pm
Columbia essentially forgives RS for being overly-sensitive to the demands of supposedly traumatized victim. But RS would not have required the assistance of Jackie to fact check the date of the frat party and discover the this particular frat not only didn’t have a party anywhere near the date cited, but they evidently don’t even rush at all during that semester.
They wouldn’t have needed the assistance of Jackie to ask her roommate if Jackie’s version of the glass bottle incident lined up with hers (it does not.) They wouldn’t have needed to do much legwork at all that the “damning’ verses of the frat fight song Erdely presents are bogus and of suspicious provenance. Forget Jackie, BASIC journalism wasn’t performed by RS here.
If they insist that they will proceed as usual with the same safeguards they had in place previous to the fiasco as Will Dana said yesterday, then their magazine has lower standards for accuracy than National Enquirer.
4/6/2024 1:40 pm
FSI,
Agreed; and that’s why it is so ridiculous that Renda stated they had not “fully come forward”. Imaginary people cannot partially come forward.
I know that Renda has said in the past that it is not her responsibility to question or challenge “survivors” accounts. Was she saying that as a rape activist or as an employee of the university. If the latter then she’s paid to help sanction men without any concern for accuracy.
4/6/2024 1:43 pm
I read the report and listened to most of the press conference (while I was doing something else).
I’d agree that the report itself seems soft, or at least not as harsh as they could have been, but in defense of CJS, perhaps that was the best that they could do under the terms of their agreement… perhaps if they could have a do-over, they would negotiate terms that allowed them to explore more.
Also, the amount of time they had available was almost certainly a limiting factor, and I say that as someone who attributed bad motives to CJS on this blog for them taking so long, and which I shouldn’t have done.
Finally, Coll didn’t strike me as being a bomb-thrower. My impression from watching him during the press conference was that he tries to be genuinely respectful of everyone, without being overly ‘PC’. He wasn’t going to go off of the pound by saying something outside of his remit, but it seemed that he had plenty more that he could say.
What matters is that no one is going to be disciplined in any way by RS. The culture flows from the top, and so the blame has to rest in large part on Wenner, and with his name being on the door… Probably the vast majority of RS’s readership is by people looking for confirmation of their own biases, so circulation is unlikely to drop, and absent that, neither will ad pages, meaning no loss of income to Wenner, and no motivation for him or his people to behave differently in the future… end of story.
4/6/2024 1:52 pm
The irony of Emily Renda is that Sheila Coronel said she could have been used as the illustrative rape victim instead of Jackie. Sabrina Erdley also had other choices.
Nobody getting fired is frustrating but the more I think about it, the better it seems. Because it really exposes Rolling Stone perfectly. Their standards are so low.
Don’t forget, this is the magazine that gave Stephen Glass another chance, and he was 100x worse than Sabrina. For all we know they are now scouting Brian Williams.
4/6/2024 2:00 pm
Maybe you could address from a business of journalism perspective, why Erdely wasn’t fired after claiming in the article she tried to contact Ryan for confirmation and then confirming to the Columbia investigators that she hadn’t? Also claiming that her story editor hadn’t asked her to contact the three “friends” when he claims he did so several times seems termination-worthy to me? What do you think? Looking forward to your thoughts.
4/6/2024 2:25 pm
Anonymous has a nice agenda. Maybe he can be the male Erderly.
4/6/2024 2:27 pm
Coll was plenty hard! That was an indictment written in plain speak - every word is measured, like a judge. He laid out what was done and why, and why it failed according to any standard. If that wasn’t an indictment I don’t know what is.
4/6/2024 2:53 pm
Hey JMil not all the anonymouses are the same person, ya know. We all get called that when we submit comment & forget to fill out the name. At least one (er, now two) of the Anon comments here in this page was made by a female, I know that for a fact & I can independently verify that without one of Sabrina Erdely’s infamous pseudonymous witnesses.
But I agree Col was pretty hard given the limited parameters of his autopsy mission.
The evidence of RS’ extensive professional malpractice is so overwhelming and so damning, he’d have brought serious discredit to his own program had he been any more lenient though.
If what RS does (and by their own admission fully intend to continue doing) is “journalism” then anyone with an agenda to push or an axe to grind can do it with no operating standards for truth or accuracy at all, therefore there would be no need to train professional journalists at Columbia and Coll would be out of a job.
4/6/2024 2:59 pm
@mespo said: “[Erdely] claiming that her story editor hadn’t asked her to contact the three “friends” when he claims he did so several times seems termination-worthy to me?”
This is a good point. Someone (either Erdely or Woods) is still not honestly fessing up here. How can Wenner keep them both on staff and expect anybody else to take seriously their claim to be recommitting to the truth?
4/6/2024 3:03 pm
One thing I like about the Coll Report is it puts a nail in the coffin of the last vestige of feminist nonsense, “something may have happened.” Even the cop, Longo, suggested that. Forget it. The report shows not even Sabrina believes that any more.
How are the deniers at Jezebel dealing with Coll?
4/6/2024 3:27 pm
At Powerline Blog, John Hinderaker is not impressed with the CJS report:
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/04/rolling-stones-rape-hoax-why-did-it-happen.php
4/6/2024 3:38 pm
It is absolutely appalling that Wenner says that Rolling Stone would hire Erdely in the future. (As others have said, she’s a freelancer, so I don’t believe that RS could “fire” her as such.)
This story is at least the second time that Erdely has written a Rolling Stone story that’s been exposed as false and based on the account of a single unreliable alleged victim. The first was “The Catholic Church’s Secret Sex Crime Files” in 2011.
Others have also pointed out potential problems with at least one of her other Rolling Stone articles (“The Rape of Petty Officer Blumer”, published in 2013). Two of her pieces for Philadelphia magazine are extremely dubious when read with a critical eye: “Shooting up in Suburbia”, from 2006, which discussed heroin use amongst middle-class suburban moms, and “Wife, Mother, Madam”, from 1998, about a Main Line mom who also ran an escort business. Both were by their nature challenging stories to fact check, and essentially impossible for a reader to even attempt to verify due to the use of pseudonyms. They were also filled with details that seem drawn from a pulpy made for TV movie - e.g., the suburban madam goes to Mass twice every week, ran away from home at 14 and became a cocaine addict, then got off drugs at 18, got a GED, and attended Rutgers.
Checking out SRE’s full career was presumably beyond the scope of the CJS report, though asking about her other work at RS should be fair game to see about patterns of behavior by her and the editors. For RS, however, there are enough issues surrounding her work both for them and for other publications that RS should want to stay far away.
4/6/2024 3:41 pm
I’m eager to hear Richard’s thoughts on this new upwelling of introspection and admission of “personal and institutional failures”. In my mind, this still comes down to one thing: a person (Erdely) with an agenda.
Beyond all of the detail in the Columbia report (which I haven’t read) there are a couple of very simple questions for Erdely that illustrate why she should bear more of the blame than Jackie and the editors.
1) what prompted you to characterize UVA with clearly biased sweeping pejorative terms like “mostly blond” “entitled” and “privileged”?
2) why did you portray the additional misogynistic verses of “Ruby Road” as part of the campus culture sprinkled in throughout the article clearly in an effort to amplify Jackie’s story, when in fact, they’re hardly known?
3) And most importantly, why did you NEVER use the words “allegedly” or “according to Jackie’s account”? These phases are among the most common in journalism and would have made it clearer that you were reporting one person’s story rather than verified truth.
Of course these questions are rhetorical because the answer is already known: Erdely had a story she wanted to tell and Jackie provided her with the script. And what we ended up with is just that — a fictional script more suited for a movie than for a magazine article presented as fact.
Sure the editors and fact checkers could have and should have spotted the errors and clearly revealed biases, but this all stems from one person, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, being an advocate story teller rather than an investigative journalist.
4/6/2024 4:30 pm
“Checking out SRE’s full career was presumably beyond the scope of the CJS report, though asking about her other work at RS should be fair game to see about patterns of behavior by her and the editors. For RS, however, there are enough issues surrounding her work both for them and for other publications that RS should want to stay far away.”
At the press conference Coll was asked about Erdely’s other work for Rolling Stone. I think he expressed an interest in reviewing it, but said they had their hands full with the UVA story.
Another reporter at the press conference asked if he’d hire Erdely.
4/6/2024 4:48 pm
I find myself wondering if Rolling Stone is not dropping the hammer on SRE and all the other people at Rolling Stone who helped bring this journalistic abomination to light is that the fraternity is indeed apparently going to sue them for libel. I am not a lawyer, let alone an expert on libel law, but I would think that Rolling Stone handing out a bunch of pink slips to people involved in this story would tend to undermine their legal defense against this.
I also think that Rolling Stone’s managers are also stuck in cloud-cuckoo land and are still in denial about the consequences this story is going to have on them, but I do wonder if there’s a legal reason behind not firing the little crew who produced the “story.”
4/6/2024 5:12 pm
To answer Stinkfoot’s question about RS’s legal liability, a lawsuit against them would be for libel, not slander, since the false information was in print.
Generally speaking, the Press Freedom clause of the First Amendment protects newspapers and magazine from libel suits, particularly where the injured party is a public figure, unless the defendant had actual knowledge that the statement was false or defamatory.
From a legal point of view, RS’s failure to attribute Ryan’s supposed “shit show” statement to Jackie, instead passing it off as a direct quote from Ryan, is particularly questionable. They deliberately edited out-and rejected the fact-checkers call to restore-disclosure that this was only Jackie’s report of her conversation with Ryan, and therefore knowingly make him out to be selfish and heartless. To make matters worse, that mis-attribution led readers to believe that RS had indeed contacted the three friends. Richard noted this ambiguity early on.
Of course, none of those defamed were public figures, and even if they were, there’s an argument that RS’s editorial process was so reckless that they should have known Jackie’s allegations were false.
I’m not saying that any of the three friends should litigate this. The amount of their damages is uncertain and probably not worth the effort and distraction of years of litigation. But it’s important to know that the First Amendment stops short of permitting news organizations to publish defamatory information they know to be false.
4/6/2024 5:59 pm
I just finished reading the entire CJR investigation report.
The thing that I believe could have prevented the mess was Erdely speaking with Jackie’s mother, ideally face to face.
“Jackie could … be hard to pin down. Other interviews Jackie said she would facilitate never materialized. “I felt frustrated, but I didn’t think she didn’t want to produce” corroboration, Erdely said. Eventually, Jackie told Erdely that her mother had thrown away the red dress. She also said that her mother would be willing to talk to Erdely, but the reporter said that when she called and left messages several times, the mother did not respond.”
I wouldn’t have proceeded with the story unless and until I’d spoken with the mother. Not by email, etc. And I would have told Jackie this.
I doubt Jackie became a fabulist after going to college. Her mother would shut down her b.s. pretty fast!
4/6/2024 6:03 pm
TRT point is great. Still shows Erderly poor poor judgment.
4/6/2024 6:09 pm
@Dave 3:38 “They were also filled with details that seem drawn from a pulpy made for TV movie – e.g., the suburban madam goes to Mass twice every week…”
Funny you should mention that. That was one of the many giveaways for a lot of people on twitter that this pseudonymous heroine of Erdely’s story “Wife Mother Madam” was bogus too. There is no theological or any other reason for a real RC to go to mass twice a week. RCs go either once on Sunday, or they go every single day, or twice a year (the ones my Mom calls the C&E’s because they show up out of the blue & take all the regulars’ seats on Christmas & Easter, heh) or they are lapsed & go not at all. Nobody goes “twice a week”.
More likely this ‘devoutly Catholic madam’ was just a figment of the non-Catholic Erdely’s trite imagination. The madam certainly spoke like someone’s walking talking cartoon. She was an hilariously inauthentic stereotype, as though her character had been lifted straight off of a vintage Lifetime network TV movie, as do most of the subjects of SRE’s work, in fact.
Come to think of it, Erdely’s stories all have another thing in common. They tend to conveniently smear the groups that the Social Justice Warrior crowd reviles & seeks to discredit (Catholics & Christians generally, the military, Boy Scouts, Southerners, blonde fraternity boys, etc) and they are full of conveniently unverifiable smears made by anonymous people using conveniently untraceable first-name only pseudonyms.
I mean, what are the odds?
4/6/2024 6:13 pm
I’m looking forward to your take on all this, Mr. Bradley! I just went back and read your first piece on the RS article. I remember being kind of shocked when I first read it, that some heretic dared actually publicly voice the skepticism that I think a lot of us felt when the RS piece first came out.
It’s amazing — and heartening!— how many others jumped in once you got the ball rolling. Now I eagerly await your final verdict
P.S. I loved Ed Morrissey’s header on this at HotAir:
“Rolling Stone: When we think a story’s too good to check … we don’t”
That’s about it in a nutshell!
4/6/2024 6:20 pm
Applogies to the anonymous! Must have a little Erderly in myself. Thought the Coll report was damning. The scope was limited and in that it did a bang up job I think. It said Rolling Stone and Erderly truly screwed up. It said thanks for a case study in how not to investigate sensitive issues such as sexual assault allegations. Every word matters in a Coll report - consider each one with about 100 times the gravity of most news analyses. He essentially said this is one lousy article and in so far as Rolling stone continues as a magazine, for journalisms.sake lets hope it doesnt produce such lousy work in the future. And by writing the critique he says in effect, i just showed you what proper investigation looks like.
4/6/2024 6:24 pm
Her name is Jackie Coakley. Her name is Jackie Coakley. Her name is Jackie Coakley.
4/6/2024 6:43 pm
… and the story’s fact-checker, who spent more than four hours on the telephone with Jackie, reviewing every detail of her experience. “She wasn’t just answering, ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ she was correcting me,” the checker said. “She was describing the scene for me in a very vivid way. … I did not have doubt.” (Rolling Stone requested that the checker not be named because she did not have decision-making authority.)
Was this the same professional individual who linked to the article calling Richard a “moron” for doubting all this bullshit? If so, she’s on twitter, and was pretty public in how she stood by her “work.”
But remember, no one’s getting fired!
Jesus fucking christ.
4/6/2024 6:47 pm
Thanks Roan,
But I am starting to think that it might be a good thing that Jackie’s name got out.
She seems to be an extremely manipulative socio-path, particularly for someone so young. I strongly doubt that this is the last time she’ll try to pull something like this.
4/6/2024 7:01 pm
Anonymous’ point about keeping them all on the payroll to keep the proverbial “rats from jumping ship” is an interesting observation. I wondered whether this was all legal posturing, given the lawsuits that now seem inevitable. As I thought about this I couldn’t help but envision a comical repeat of the classic scene in the movie Spinal Tap. It goes something like this:
“Jann, we have to fire Erdely, she’s a fabulist”
“What’s wrong with being fabulous?”
4/6/2024 7:23 pm
“Shit show”…that’s an apt description of both the article and the way Rolling Stone does business.
4/6/2024 7:27 pm
This has already been noted in these comments, but it bears repeating. From the CJS review:
“If I had been informed ahead of time of one problem or discrepancy with her overall story, we would have acted upon that very aggressively,” Dana said. “There were plenty of other stories we could have told in this piece.” If anyone had raised doubts about how verifiable Jackie’s narrative was, her case could have been summarized “in a paragraph deep in the story.”
Unbelievable. That would have been his aggressive action. Reporting the alleged gang rape in a summary manner. Had they taken that step, to this day, the story would have been perceived as true. Makes me sick to my stomach that this is Dana’s take away. He has no integrity.
4/6/2024 7:56 pm
According to a new story at the NY Times:
“Ms. Erdely is working on another story for the magazine, according to a person with knowledge of the assignment, who spoke on condition of anonymity.”
4/6/2024 7:57 pm
And I assume she’s getting paid pretty well to do it. Modern journalism is quite amazing…
4/6/2024 8:08 pm
Yeah, Erderly and Rolling Stone threw the University+ under the bus. Now the bus backed up and ran over Erderly and Rolling Stone.
As for the accuser - just plain sad. Rolling Stone and Erderly never should have taken her seriously and her story never should have gotten into the article or anywhere else for that matter. Needs some serious counseling and to come clean in an op-ed herself. Not holding my breath.
That’s why I say the fraternities have their integrity intact. They took it on the chin, let the process do its work and they’re on the other side of it - innocent. Look who’s not: Rolling Stone, Erderly, and the accuser. They know they did nothing wrong. And everyone else believe it or not, lives with the fact that they did do something wrong, and that’s on the record with the police report and the Coll report.
May not seem like much, but integrity is a big deal. Some have it and some don’t. Some have more of it than others. The brothers have theirs.
4/6/2024 8:10 pm
Erderly’s lousy reporting is pretty awful for this piece - sensational, distorted and wrong. That she gets another chance - I think it’s very fortunate. Maybe Erderly will be a better journalist, could happen. More humble at least. I’d think Erderly isn’t saying certain things because the moment it’s out - lawsuit, lawsuit, lawsuit. I’d hope in private it happened but again, given everything, not about to happen.
4/6/2024 10:44 pm
Something that only a small percentage of the public understands, even months after the December revelations, is that this started out before the purported rape as a catfishing hoax by Jackie Coakley to get Ryan to fall in love with her by conjuring handsome dream date Haven Monahan into pseudo-existence with fake text messages and emails.
4/6/2024 10:52 pm
I certainly don’t think that Erdely will be given the chance to write the same kind of stories she was writing before, i.e. politically charged long form journalism relying on anonymous whistle-blowers. Certainly not if the Rolling Stone editors have a pair of brain cells among them.
I still don’t think Erdely has much of a career left in journalism. When you are writing long form investigative articles your readership is usually just going to need to take your word for it for a lot of your claims. That’s just not going to happen anymore. I predict they put her on the music beat for a few more articles, then we don’t really hear from her again.
4/6/2024 10:55 pm
@Steve Sailer
I’m sure everyone here is aware of that. Anyway, only a small percentage of the population ever bothers to find out the real story behind the stuff they watch in the news, so that’s not much of a surprise.
4/6/2024 11:02 pm
The Kelly File is now leading with the story, incl. two former friends of Jackie. Starting with Howard Kurtz.
4/6/2024 11:07 pm
Megan McArdle at Bloomberg View has a new story:
“Rolling Stone Can’t Even Apologize Right”
“… she was in my class at the University of Pennsylvania.”
Good, thoughtful, interesting analysis.
4/6/2024 11:18 pm
Here’s an interesting one for you, Richard:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-uber-driver-rape-charge-dropped-met-20150406-story.html
- I faded in and out of consciousness and awoke to him raping me in his apartment.
- Funny, in this recording he made of the cab ride, you sound perfectly in control of your senses, and gave him a big hug and kiss as you got out of the car.
- Oh, nevermind then.
Not sure what the circumstances were that he made the recording.
4/6/2024 11:19 pm
The CJR analysis was not satisfying to anyone following this episode throughout. T Rees Shapiro and Erik Wemple from the Wash Post destroyed RS and Erderly back in early December. The CJR’s tone still had PC/rape culture tone throughout (e.g., “survivors”). KC Johnson at Minding the Campus, as always, hits the nail on the head with his latest post.
4/6/2024 11:23 pm
What Glenn Reynolds said:
One person who shouldn’t get off the hook here is UVA President Teresa Sullivan. She essentially found the fraternity guilty based on a story in a music tabloid. She could have told the University community that “we don’t convict people based on stories in the media,” that she was going to independently investigate the accusations, and that people named in tabloid stories should be regarded as innocent until proven guilty in the American tradition. She did no such thing. She hastily imposed a group punishment on the entire Greek system, and pretty much stood by while angry crowds mobbed and vandalized the fraternity house…. As I’ve said before, there’s no place in America today where the authorities are more likely to be found siding with (or at least enabling) a lynch mob than on a university campus, and that’s a disgrace.
University presidents, along with the rest of the administration and faculty, talk a lot about a “university community.” But when it comes time to show students who produce bad press the kind of fairness that any member of an academic community should expect as a matter of right, they often drop the ball. At the very least, Sullivan owes these fraternity guys, and the Greek community, an open, public, and contrite apology. If I were on the UVA Board of Visitors, I’d be demanding her resignation.
Amen. #MaleStudentsMatterToo
4/6/2024 11:23 pm
Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/04/06/will-an-apology-be-forthcoming-from-u-va-president-teresa-sullivan/
4/6/2024 11:27 pm
If Sullivan only wants to represent and protect female students, let her get a job at some all-girls school. Fostering/abetting a hostile environment for men should be an equal right violation.
4/6/2024 11:33 pm
Nice to see Glenn woefully misinformed. Keep writing yourself into a hole, Glenn
4/6/2024 11:57 pm
Megan McArdle made this great point:
“Erdely’s statement focuses on her fear of retraumatizing Jackie, something that also comes up in the CJR report. But something less salutary also appears: the fear of losing a really good story. These things seem to have sort of gotten blended together, so that when problems emerged with the reporting, everyone involved at Rolling Stone was able to convince themselves to go forward anyway on the grounds that Jackie is a trauma victim and it’s dangerous to retraumatize her. Yet they don’t seem to have been worried about retraumatizing her by running her story in a national magazine.”
Haha!
4/7/2024 12:11 am
Steve, I think with the girl, the big issue is the exploitation - it’s one thing to manufacture a huge whopper of a lie, and quite another for a major publication to consider the whopper, truth. Rolling Stone had a financial/influence interest here so the blame goes there - they stirred the pot up.
As for the girl, no one’s getting to the bottom of that one except them. She’ll have to live with that one on the conscience and go somewhere better than denial. That’s why I’d hope for the counseling - she clearly has a huge problem if she’s willing to throw friends, an innocent bunch of frat guys (who did nothing) and the University a curve ball of her own making and then run so fast and so far away from accounting for it or taking any responsibility whatsoever.
An I’m sorry would have been nice from either of these characters. At least with the blanket apology Erderly could be seen as saying sorry to the University community - which includes the Phi Psi brothers and the fraternity system. But the subject of the article - at least the subject at the center of the storm - who knows. I’d say they might think they are getting away with something, but in the long run no one gets away with something forever
4/7/2024 12:16 am
Wow, the fraternity is filing a lawsuit against Rolling Stone.
4/7/2024 12:44 am
what is the right term, rape victim or survivor ?
4/7/2024 1:35 am
Coll ducked the question of whether anyone should be fired. So the CJR asked somebody else:
“Should there have been firings at Rolling Stone?”
“With the news that Rolling Stone has chosen not to punish any of its employees in the wake of the Columbia report, we asked Jill Geisler to weigh in on that decision.”
Liz Spayd: The report describes a long list of journalistic failures. Are these firing offenses?
Jill Geisler: They are…
4/7/2024 2:24 am
At reason dot com, an anodyne-sounding opinion piece from Robby Soave. A more incisive analysis from Peter Suderman.
But the best editorial that I’ve seen is at American Thinker, headlined “What Columbia Missed In Its Review of Rolling Stone”:
Ouch!
4/7/2024 2:24 am
The report is a good road map — we in journalism need bracing reminders like this to keep our eyes on the ball…however, unfathomable to me that Will Dana and the story editor still have their jobs. If they have a shred of honor they need to resign. If Jayson Blair can bring down Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd, then surely this offense merits the same result.
…and while I’ve generally been a defender of Theresa Sullivan, I’m reconsidering that in light of the police report. At this point she needs to meet face to face with the Phi Psis and apologize and indicate that she’s learned at least the basics of “presumed innocent” after 40 years in academia.
4/7/2024 5:39 am
“Yet they don’t seem to have been worried about retraumatizing her by running her story in a national magazine.”
And this is where their carefully constructed legalistic defense of libel and defamation falls apart and will be dissected in a civil trial. It is a lie, an after the fact butt covering exercise, and will be proven as such.
4/7/2024 5:51 am
This whole episode is a illustration of what is wrong with so much of the media today: they go into things with a conviction in their minds that they’re determined to prove instead of trying to find out if there is any basis for their conviction.
Imagine if RS had followed that path instead. It’s unlikely that we would be where we are now.
The media like to preen about being independent watch dogs… what they really are are shills for things they want to believe.
4/7/2024 7:12 am
Ed Driscoll: “Hot Take from the New Republic: ‘Rolling Stone’s Rape Article Failed Because It Used Rightwing Tactics’”
“So just to confirm, the left have had a near-lock on Big Journalism since the days when Walter Cronkite and Daniel Schorr smeared Barry Goldwater as a crypto-Nazi on the air at CBS in 1964. And journalists such as Janet Cooke of the Washington Post, Jayson Blair of the New York Times, and ahem, Stephen Glass of the New Republic have all been caught pulling false stories out of their Smith-Coronas. But of course for 24-year old Elizabeth S. Bruenig, that’s all the right’s fault:
MT @tnr: “@RollingStone shouldn’t have used rightwing tactics to talk about campus rape.”
4/7/2024 8:10 am
Sullivan face to face apology to the brothers would be awesome. UVa will likely do an internal review and share it with someone.
From Jan Wenner at Rolling Stone. As much as i see it as RS fault in trusting Erderly who trusted Jackie, Rolling Stone’s initial apology to readers about misplaced trust, still has a place.
“Wenner…described Jackie as ‘a really expert fabulist storyteller’ who managed to manipulate the magazine’s journalism process.”
Wenner: “Obviously there is something here that is untruthful, and something sits at her doorstep”, Wenner told the New York Times.
Wow. Even if Coll says it is RS fault AND IT IS there is a huge character problem. Jackie’s manipulations were a magnet for trouble, and drew in: a sexual assault awareness group, a university community, friends, a fraternity, a campus, a sensationalist. journalist who was sympathetic to the point she wouldnt do her job, or worse, a magazine, nearly every media outlet in the u.s., several overseas, alumni, a nation…it blew everything up.
One lie, told many times in many ways. No apology.
4/7/2024 9:45 am
I wish people wouldn’t tip-toe around the fact that Jackie is a liar. Calling her a “fabulist” is ridiculous.
4/7/2024 10:08 am
@JMil:
One lie, told many times in many ways. No apology.
I agree. The ultimate fault here lies not with SRE, or RS, or even UVA (the first parties taken in).
Nor does the fault like with “Rape Culture.” It lies with “Rape Survivor Culture” that dictates that there is an event so terrible that one does not need to provide one scintilla of evidence to support the claim, but only unconditional acceptance.
In this respect it is actually very much like the child abuse/Satanic Day Care hysteria of the 1980’s.
If only one person had demanded put up or shut up on this claim, the claim wouldn’t have propagated, and more and more people wouldn’t have been taken in, precisely because it had been allowed to propagate, and therefore “it must be true on some level.”
The only good thing about this is that it underlines the extent that we are susceptible to hysteria in this domain, as well as others. That said, I wonder what we will be getting hysterical about next year.
4/7/2024 10:17 am
Re m77 above: Agreed. Yet “duped by a fabulist” is even more ridiculous.
4/7/2024 10:28 am
Many outlets, most notoriously the New York Times, have intentionally obscured the fact that Jackie Coakley elaborately concocted — “catfished” — the nonexistent Haven Monahan several days before claiming to be raped by him in order to make Ryan jealous and fall in love with her. And five days later she switched back to pretending to be the nice Haven again in the “Glitch in the Matrix” email
I’ve talked to a lot of people about this hoax, and the realization that Coakley made him up ahead of time, and then went back to ginning up an email from Haven praising her later, is the absolute dealbreaker for them. You can make up all sorts of plausible scenarios in which her story is sort of, kind of true. But once you have it pounded into your head that she made up Haven ahead of time and then sent the “Glitch in the Matrix” email from Haven to poor Ryan days later, Coakley’s credibility is absolutely ruined.
The NYT is very intent on staying a Safe Space for Jackie Believers. Over all these months NYT has only mentioned the name “Haven Monahan” once in one of its own articles, on March 24, and another time in an AP article it reprinted on March 23. The NYT has never made clear to its readers why “Haven Monahan” is a dealbreaker.
4/7/2024 10:32 am
When are the Social Justice Warriors who carried out the Kristallnacht on the fraternity house going to be arrested? Jeffrey Scott Shapiro had no problem identifying the pogromists in his 12/21/2014 Washington Times story:
“Unpunished vandalism rampage inspired by Rolling Stone’s U.Va. rape story
“Student activist who led vandalism attack on Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house says he has no regrets”
4/7/2024 10:46 am
As anxious I am waiting for Mr. Bradley to publish something, I am actually glad he didn’t publish anything yet because that means he is taking his time.
4/7/2024 10:50 am
I agree with Mr. Sailer. I thought the Charlottesville Police Department was competent and professional in its handling of the Hannah Graham case. In this instance, however, I get the impression that a President Sullivan is pulling strings of Cheif Longo. Obviously, there is no love loss between Sullivan and the Greek life at UVA.
There were two separate attacks on the fraternity. The Washington Times identified the first attackers, and yet Longo can’t (or won’t do the same). It’s disheartening that both the police and the President, who are both suppose to protect all students at UVA, appear only concerned with the safety of rape victims and false accusers.
I am surprised and disappointed in Cheif Longo and the Charlottesville Police Department.
4/7/2024 10:53 am
The RS defense strategy looks to be “Stenographer Sabrina” and the rest of the Rolling Stone team were only the conduit through which Jackie’s story was passed. In order to respect current sensitivities about not questioning “rape survivors”, due diligence was not possible. Once presented with the story, they had a moral duty not to question it, but to pass it on to the wider public. If they made any mistake, it was in not communicating sufficiently to their readers the implications of the editorial position to not question rape survivors.
So since Stenographer Sabrina was nothing more than a dutiful conduit; since journalist skepticism was inappropriate in this situation, no firing offense was committed.
That seems to be their position at least.
4/7/2024 10:55 am
Oh boy. Sorry for the misspellings and grammatical errors. I really need to use my reading glasses in my old age.
4/7/2024 10:59 am
@steve Sailer
The NYT and other MSM outlets have a problem with the case. As you noted already in early December of last year, we are most likely dealing with a profoundly disturbed young woman, and therefore, to call her out must seem cruel. At the same time, it was cruel for SRE, RS, NYT and the rest of the MSM to give her credence and a big spotlight to begin with. So it’s a no win situation.
It would be in the interests of fairness and self-awareness to describe the fateful and yet brief existence of Haven Monahan (title: “Safe Haven”) in order to remind ourselves as to how, even in our Godless and secular age, we humans are still prone to succumb to delusions, and how monstrous “Rape Survivor Culture”, borne of pity and compassion, can become.
But don’t hold your breath.
4/7/2024 11:13 am
Wasn’t it part of the story that Jackie was REALLY, REALLY TAKING SOME FRUSTRATION OUT ON HER SAFETY SCHOOL? People who internalize their failures/shortcomings can act out in different ways, both women and men do so. But I wouldn’t forget that beyond her invention of jealousy-inducing male paramours, she was dealing with the hurt that the ultra-competitive college admissions game leaves on ambitious but less successful students; and she was therefore defaming those she believed to be unworthy of her, but whom her personal abilities, and the establishment’s estimation of her abilities, designated her as belonging with. These are complicated things in a young woman’s life, but there they are.
4/7/2024 11:18 am
Shorter NYT on UVAHoax denial:
Extremism in defense of The Narrative is no vice.
4/7/2024 11:52 am
“[E]veryone involved at Rolling Stone was able to convince themselves to go forward anyway on the grounds that Jackie is a trauma victim and it’s dangerous to retraumatize her. Yet they don’t seem to have been worried about retraumatizing her by running her story in a national magazine”
Yep, good catch by Megan Mcardle at BV on that. They were perfectly willing to retraumatize their bogus “survivor” to get the millions of clicks (and commensurate ad revenue) that their thinly sourced and wildly sensationalistic story would generate.
RS’ current rationale for their gross dereliction in exercising due diligence isn’t going to hold water with a good defamation lawyer standing in front of a jury box poking that big honking hole in it.
4/7/2024 12:09 pm
@Winter 11:18 am-
It may be that some of these social activists- cum-‘ journalists’ who are happy to see innocent men continue to suffer under a cloud of guilt in order to advance their precious narrative aren’t going to get how evil the presumption of guilt really is until it is either themselves or one of their kids who is falsely accused of something horriffic for the purposes of advancing a different ‘narrative’.The current campus rape crisis hysteria that the New York Times is willing to throw innocent citizens to the wolves to promote isn’t even supported by statistics, so we can only deduce there is a more nefarious agenda underlying their willingness to sacrifice other people’s reputations and freedom to achieve it.
4/7/2024 12:30 pm
Somewhat off topic but I was annoyed by the narrative-journalism form of the Columbia report itself. As one example, in describing SRE’s “come-to-Jesus” moment after publication, the report says
“Jackie gave Erdely a name. But as the reporter typed, her fingers stopped. Jackie was unsure how to spell the lifeguard’s last name. Jackie speculated aloud about possible variations.”
Did SRE spoon-feed this language to them? It has the same lifetime-drama feel of her own writing. Do we need to see the image of her fingers suddenly hesitating on the keyboard? Why waste space in a professional report with this?
Moreover, the report’s assertion that SRE independently came to doubt the veracity of the story after publication is beyond credibility. It’s obvious that third-party scrutiny of this story pushed RS into retraction. The likelihood that SRE would have independently chosen to challenge her own story, after publication, is zero.
I’m curious how much consultation and input Rolling Stone had into the final Columbia report. It reads as though it was heavily vetted.
4/7/2024 12:38 pm
The Coakley / Rubin Erdely hoax in Rolling Stone was self-evidently absurd. All that broken glass …
4/7/2024 12:48 pm
@stinkfoot
Somewhat off topic but I was annoyed by the narrative-journalism form of the Columbia report itself.
I completely agree. All that first person stuff — meant to heighten the drama — was unnecessary and irrelevant.
What the narrative journalistic style did allow however was for CJS to not have to actually construct a timeline, both for the disclosure of the rape allegation over time, but also able to fudge the details for how the allegation was ultimately exploded. In other words, if CJS had done an actual analytical piece they wouldn’t have been able to leave things out, and that would have been far more damaging to Jackie and her enablers: UVA womens’ groups, UVA administration, SRE, the staff at Rolling Stone, etc.
4/7/2024 12:48 pm
@steve sailer
4/7/2024 12:50 pm
@steve sailer
As soon as I got to the para about the broken table and grab it by its leg I stopped reading and started scanning to see if there was any independent corroboration for any of this in the rest of the article. There wasn’t, so I knew it was BS.
The rest of it — Blanket ‘n’ Armpit, the idea of a frat having gang rape initiation rituals, etc. I never got around to taking seriously.
4/7/2024 12:52 pm
@ Stinkfoot
Ya that story is a little ridiculous. Can you imagine what “campus rape activists” would normally say about someone who doubted a “survivor” based on the fact that she couldn’t immediately spell her attacker’s last name off the top of her head.
4/7/2024 12:56 pm
“Jackie gave Erdely a name. But as the reporter typed, her fingers stopped. Jackie was unsure how to spell the lifeguard’s last name. Jackie speculated aloud about possible variations.”
Did SRE spoon-feed this language to them? It has the same lifetime-drama feel of her own writing. Do we need to see the image of her fingers suddenly hesitating on the keyboard? Why waste space in a professional report with this?
————————————
Good catch, @stinkfoot
4/7/2024 12:58 pm
OPEN LETTER TO JANN WENNER:
Mr. Wenner:
You really need to rethink your decision not to sever RS’s relationship with Sabrina Erdely, and not to fire Sean Woods, her editor. You apparently believe they (along with your fact checkers, and your managing editor) have learned from their mistakes. But that respectfully misses the point.
The reason you have to fire Woods and Erdely has nothing to do with whether you think Woods and Erdely are reformed or not. It’s about the NEXT reporter and editor faced with whether to sacrifice a basic journalistic principle for the sake of expediency (or sensationalism, or to advance a political agenda, or whatever). They have to know their careers are on the line, or this will happen again.
4/7/2024 1:01 pm
“Grab its motherfucking leg,” says the first rapist to one of his “brothers.” It reminds me of Silence of the Lambs: “It rubs the lotion on its skin…” But Silence of the Lambs was fiction.
From RB’s first post on this hoax. That was my “Oh come on, no WAY” moment as well.
4/7/2024 1:03 pm
@Austin: How jealous is Stephen Glass right about now? He should have made up fake rape stories, then he would still have his job too!
4/7/2024 1:18 pm
Did anyone else see the interview of Coll and Coronel? It’s by Elizabeth Spayd (CJR). It’s over 4,000 words and a bit more blunt in some ways than the actual report. Coll ends the discussion with this statement:
“If anyone thinks there was a golden age of excellent reporting practice, that’s probably wrong. But certainly now, there are a lot of new entrants and a lot of young self-educating reporters who need a way to talk about these practices at a level of real ethical detail and seriousness. Because if you get it wrong that can not only have consequences that are serious for others but you can end your career, real quickly.”
4/7/2024 1:37 pm
I can’t understand why a tidal wave of journalists hasn’t started poring over Erdely’s old stories to “re-report” them. They read as obvious fiction; like how could Erdely have known these thoughts in this heroin-addict-suburban mom’s head? She’s writing in first-person omniscient:
“Mom, I’m sick. I have a stomachache.”
Not today. Please, not today. In her sunlit kitchen, Tina swallows down a wave of nausea, tries for a Patient Mommy voice. “Lizzie, honey, you’re fine. You have to go to school,” Tina pleads. Go. Go. Get out. “Now get dressed.”
Nine-year-old Lizzie storms off to her bedroom. Tina concentrates on washing Lizzie’s cereal bowl, her hands shaking. She just needs to keep it together until the school bus comes. Another — she glances at the microwave clock — 15 minutes. Fifteen minutes: An eternity. Until then, Tina needs to act normally, as though she is any other suburban mom.
“Moooom! I’m not wearing these pants! I hate them!” Lizzie wails from upstairs, and Tina is seized with panic.
“You put on those pants right now and get dressed!” she screams, shriller than she intended. Tina clutches at the counter with both hands, so anxious that she’s having trouble breathing. Be here now, she inwardly chants. She and Lizzie go through this push-and-pull routine every morning; the school psychologist says it’s on account of the divorce. Well, the divorce hasn’t been easy on Tina, either. Neither has the custody battle, for that matter. Tina’s stressed. Wound up. Needs to relax. Tina thinks of her shoebox upstairs, stashed away in the dark, and wants to cry out with need. Eight more minutes. She tries distracting herself with other thoughts, and her mind instantly fills: her ruined marriage. Lizzie’s falling grades. Her mother’s breast cancer. Her high-intensity job as an emergency room nurse. Her loneliness. A whimper escapes her throat. Five more minutes. Hold on.”
4/7/2024 2:09 pm
I’m glad you are taking the time to respond carefully, but we’re waiting with bated breath!
4/7/2024 2:22 pm
@Zorkon - I agree with you that the SRE story about suburban middle-class mom heroin addicts is at best highly embellished and very possibly a complete fabrication. As I noted in a comment above, her 1998 story “Wife, Mother, Madam” falls into the same category. The problem with re-reporting either one, however, is that the use of pseudonyms and passage of time make verifying or re-reporting either story next to impossible.
4/7/2024 2:44 pm
I think it’s safe at this point to class all of her long-form pieces as fiction, unless she’s willing &/or able to provide some means of verifying the truth of them.
4/7/2024 3:18 pm
I think it’s important not to forget that the fish rots from the head down… focusing on SRE alone lets Wenner, Dana, Woods, McPherson and whoever else was involved escape needed scrutiny. Everybody concerned knew what they had in Erdely as a subordinate and/or co-worker.
Wenner has enough money that his reputation is probably more important to him than a few bucks (relatively speaking). I wouldn’t be surprised to see him try to quietly settle any potential legal claims and enforce them with non-disclosure agreements. He could then get rid of some of those responsible by paying them off with rich settlements, again with non-disclosure terms. If he does both of those things, any interest in his involvement (or lack of in terms of being Editor in any sense other than as a figurehead) will quickly die.
4/7/2024 3:22 pm
Sabrina Rubin Erdely is an American magazine reporter best known for the publication in Rolling Stone of an article detailing the alleged rape, later found not to have occurred, of a University of Virginia student by several fraternity members. — Wikipedia
Who would have thought that Wikipedia would characterize the ‘rape’ in this way? Good for them…
4/7/2024 3:39 pm
Don’t have time to read through all the previous comments, but I wonder if anyone else suggested reviewing Ms. Erdely’s previous pieces. Fabulism is usually not a one time deal.
4/7/2024 3:41 pm
Richard —
Great quote about you on Politico by Jack Shafer (Rolling Stone and the Media’s Glass House):
Within days of the publication of “A Rape on Campus,” Worth magazine editor Richard Bradley was unpeeling its most dubious layers on his personal blog with less effort than you’d use to skin a banana. “One must be most critical about stories that play into existing biases,” Bradley wrote. “And this story nourishes a lot of them.”
Well deserved.
4/7/2024 4:14 pm
Guess: Erderly writing a mea culpa for Rolling Stone. And they dont have to fire her, they can just give her short pieces. SRE is a contract writer I think. So it’s a way of saying no we won’t fire her…we’ll just not hire her for major stories. If we do we won’t run anything sensational. In the non contract world it would be a demotion. Here it is the dog housr.
4/7/2024 4:20 pm
Erdely’s apology stated in part:
“The past few months, since my Rolling Stone article ‘A Rape on Campus’ was first called into question, have been among the most painful of my life.”
I have friends in the Phi Psi house. Erdely’s ineptness made their lives a living hell, so excuse me for not feeling too sorry for her. Heads should have rolled.
Not only will I never read another issue of Rolling Stone, I will not use any products advertised in the magazine.
4/7/2024 5:33 pm
Last night I saw an interview of two guys involved in Jackie’s Scheme, incl. the target of her affection, whom she wanted to make jealous.
The other guy said he’s asked around, and nobody knows where Jackie is. She’s at an undisclosed location, more carefully hidden than somebody in the Witness Protection Program.
They were asked what should be done with Sabrina, and politely declined to recommend termination. However, one said he’d have difficulty trusting her future writing.
Does anyone in journalism remember when a writer who had committed such egregious mistakes received no punishment?
It seems to me, based on what others have said about her previous writing, she was an accident waiting to happen.
With no discipline for this fiasco, one can expect another train wreck in the future. The lack of apology and finger pointing at her boss makes her look more like a sociopath who is incapable of learning and avoiding another journalism disaster. At Rolling Stone she is surrounded by enablers.
4/8/2024 4:22 pm
I would think Sabrina Erdely’s career as a reporter is effectively in the toilet at this time. She doesn’t have to be fired but what magazine will wish to publish anything she might write? She’d make more money as a McDonald’s assistant night manager at this point then she would attempting to get her articles published.
4/8/2024 8:30 pm
Great post. I agree 100%.
BTW: Noticed 3 spelling errors, shown below.
1) “sitting back is his frat boy lair”
should be… “sitting back IN his frat boy lair”
2) “did not say that Erdely attributes to them”
should be… “did not say WHAT Erdely attributes to them”
3) “that maybe, must maybe, they were wrong about this”
should be… “that maybe, JUST maybe, they were wrong about this”
4/8/2024 10:10 pm
>journalists such as Janet Cooke of the Washington Post, Jayson Blair of the New York Times, and ahem, Stephen Glass of the New Republic
Trying to figure out why a commenter here keeps referring to Stephen Glass as some leftist. His articles were out of the fever brain of a white nationalist, playing to all the right-wing magazine owners worst racist stereotypes. I know this is pretty tangential to the blog post, but this is at least the third time in recent months that someone has posted something like this.
4/9/2024 10:13 am
ryan —
Forget about the fact that Jann Wenner is a left-wing magazine owner publishing the left-wing version of what you allude to in your comment — to stuff that they ‘believe’ — even if it’s demonstratively untrue… for every right-wing magazine owner that you referenced, there is a left-wing one too.
But the reason that your comment jumps out to me (beyond your stereotyping) is that I’ve always found it odd that the owners of these magazines who are presumed to be so right-wing would allow so much left-wing ideology to permeate the pages of their magazines. In a way it’s a good thing, in that the editors are obviously allowed a free hand independent of the owners’ political beliefs (assuming the owners were really as right-wing as they were made out to be). But perhaps it shouldn’t surprise me… money usually trumps ideology across the entire political spectrum.
4/9/2024 11:33 am
Trying to figure out why a commenter here keeps referring to Stephen Glass as some leftist.
Because his invented articles, when they had a political bent, were uniformly attacking the right.
In May 1997, Joe Galli of the College Republican National Committee wrote a letter to the editor accusing Glass of fabrications in “Spring Breakdown”, his lurid tale of drinking and debauchery at the 1997 Conservative Political Action Conference. A June 1997 article called “Peddling Poppy” about a Hofstra University conference on George H. W. Bush drew a letter to the editor from Hofstra reciting Glass’s errors.[11]
I’m interested in understanding what about his writing was “playing to all the right-wing magazine owners worst racist stereotypes.”
4/9/2024 10:56 pm
I made a typo in failing to type an apostrophe - “owner’s worst racist stereotypes.”
I was referring specifically to the New Republic and only to the New Republic. It was already a right wing magazine when Glass was there, and Glass was playing to Marty Peretz, who had vile views of black people. Glass wrote articles that were transparently false to anyone who has ever spoken with black people - just everything was wrong about them. But no one at TNR noticed. I wasn’t trying to say that all right wing magazine owners are racist (though with the dropped apostrophe, it does read that way.) I was just saying that Marty Peretz was a racist, and that his racism was what gave Glass his opening..
4/9/2024 11:25 pm
Marshall,
HIs ridiculous “Taxi Cabs and the Meaning of Work” was the racist piece that launched his career by endearing him to Peretz.
There was the hack job on the Center for Science in the Public Interest, the ugliness he spewed at Vernon Jordan.
4/10/2024 7:17 am
ryan —
Thanks for the reply. The dropped apostrophe certainly changes the context.
4/10/2024 3:58 pm
Good summary, as usual.
“And what it actually managed to come up with was an investigation into a social hysteria akin to Salem or Satanic abuse cases.”
I believe that whole “rape culture” thing on college campuses now is another moral panic similar to the “recovered memories” hysteria of the early 90s or the day care hysteria of the 80s. It’s not exactly political or “left wing” so much as it is an example of the culture wars that involve not only traditional marriage but the whole parenthood, and especially fatherhood, culture.
Parents were initially the accused in the “Satanic Abuse” scandals. After that, the males in day care centers were attacked. Recovered Memories was about fathers. Colleges used to act “in loco parentis” and are now the accused although fraternities are easy targets since most administrators hate them.
Any authority figure, although few college administrators are willing to exert any authority, is now the target.I suspect that STEM subject departments are much less subject to being targeted as those students are serious about learning. The rest ? I just don’t know. I have three daughters and none saw anything like rape while in college.