The paper of record continues its bizarrely one-sided reporting on the issue of campus sexual assault today, as film writer Brooks Barnes pens a glowing review of a new documentary called “The Hunting Ground.”
I first heard about this film a few days ago in a Variety review; Variety called the documentary “a buzzed-about documentary about the epidemic of sexual assault on college campuses.”
That word “epidemic” always sets my alarm bells ringing, as there’s absolutely no evidence that this is true, and in fact, there’s real evidence that there is considerably less sexual assault on college campuses than there is, well, everywhere else.
Variety continues:
Statistics indicate that as many as 20 percent of college women are sexually assaulted on college campuses in the United States in a year. But a tiny fraction of the attackers ever face any disciplinary action, and college hearings rarely expel students for rape.
Except that statistics don’t indicate that 20 percent of college women are sexually assaulted on college campuses. And while I’m sure that there are no reliable statistics on the number of “attackers” who ever face any disciplinary action, to the extent that this is the case, the main reason for this appears to be that, even with standards of proof lower than you’d find in a criminal court, many of these allegations are hard-to-prove and/or tenuous.
The Times’ review goes even further in its uncritical promotion of the “epidemic.”
At the premiere here on Friday, audience members repeatedly gasped as student after student spoke on camera about being sexually assaulted — and being subsequently ignored or run through endless hoops by college administrators concerned about keeping rape statistics low.
I haven’t seen the film, so I don’t want to go overboard here—especially because I’m sure that some of the horror stories are true. (The recent case at Vanderbilt appears to be one such example.) But I just don’t believe that there’s some sort of systemic conspiracy to “keep rape statistics low” out of fear of reputational damage. Maybe rape statistics are low because there’s no epidemic of campus rape. And university administrators are not typically cold heartless sinister bureaurats. (Remember, these are the people that the right-wing typically portrays as aging lefty hippies or politically correct SJWs; now the left-wing has them as something out of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.)
The film is going to air on CNN sometime this year, which allows CNN head Jeff Zucker—formerly producer of the Today show who is now busily destroying CNN in order to save it—the chance to talk about how brave the network is.
“We’re not afraid,” Jeff Zucker, president of CNN Worldwide, said after the panel, when asked about a potentially forceful response from higher education officials to “The Hunting Ground.” “They’re on the wrong side.” CNN has not revealed an air date except to say that it will run the film by the end of the year.
Indeed. Because, you know, those higher education officials are known for their vicious, merciless responses. I mean…are we living in the same world here. How many people could even name a higher education official other than, perhaps, the president of the university they attend(ed)?
Then Mr. Barnes writes one of the oddest paragraphs I’ve read in some time. (Is there an editor in the house?)
Underscoring the degree to which media scrutiny of campus rape can provoke swift and severe pushback, Rolling Stone in November was forced to step away from a provocative article focused on accusations of a gang rape at the University of Virginia. The magazine acknowledged that it had erred in relying solely on the word of the accuser, named only as Jackie, and did not try to contact the men she accused.
“Swift and severe pushback?” Is Barnes on crack? Since when is pointing out that a story is terribly reported and quite likely false “swift and severe pushback”? And remember—there was a vast media silence about that story until I and a few other folks started raising doubts. There certainly wasn’t any “swift” pushback.
But wait—there’s more. That sentence—”the magazine acknowledged that it had erred in relying solely on the word of the accuser…” makes it sound like Rolling Stone forgot to cross a “t” and dot an “i.” A fairer sentence would have said, “The magazine admitted that it had failed to prove its allegations, which now appear to be fake.”
But Barnes make it sound like the reaction to the Rolling Stone story only proves the legitimacy of the issue. I’m trying to get my head around the logic: Because people reacted strongly to a story that wasn’t true, therefore “media scrutiny of campus rape” is somehow under siege. It’s intellectual vapor from Cloud Cuckoo-land.
Barnes also mentions that 90 schools are being investigated by the Department of Education for their handling of sexual assault cases. you see that and similar numbers reported a lot. But he doesn’t report (does he know?) how such investigations are launched; any student can write a letter to the DOE complaining of a Title IX violation, and the Department is required to initiate an investigation. So the mere fact of a large number of investigations does not in and of itself mean very much.
I would have thought that the Rolling Stone fiasco would have caused people in the press–and particularly the Times, which was so embarrassed by the follow-up reporting of the Washington Post—to employ at least a little skepticism about the “epidemic” of sexual assault on campus. I was wrong. The epidemic of bad journalism continues unabated.