“Last month, Rolling Stone ran an article about an alleged gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity house, based on interviews with a student identified only as “Jackie.” It now appears that key details of the story, reported by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, may not be true. Other journalists—notably, my friend Hanna Rosin and Allison Benedikt, at Slate, and Paul Farhi, Erik Wemple, and T. Rees Shapiro, at The Washington Post—raised doubts about the reporting late last month, but Rolling Stone dismissed them.” [emphasis added]

—Margaret Talbot, writing in the New Yorker

What’s missing? I’ll give you a hint: The one journalist who “raised doubts about the reporting” before all the journalists Talbot lists.

Listen, I’m not territorial, but…are you kidding me? It was not easy being the first person to question the Rolling Stone story. Being first meant taking the brunt of the hostility from people who didn’t want to hear anything that might undermine the article. It also meant going out on a reputational limb; I didn’t think I was wrong, but imagine if I had been. These things only look easy to write in retrospect.

Paul Farhi, who was the first person after me to raise any concerns, did so four days after my blog post. And even he buried his doubts pretty far down in a profile of Erdely.

(Correction: Hanna Rosin’s Slate Gabfest came three days later, on November 27.)

Meantime, if you go back and look at that original blog post, you can see that a) it has been proved correct on every point, and b) it has fundamentally driven the media narrative about Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s article.

So, yes, I guess it does matter to me when people don’t give credit where it’s due.

The New Yorker has a storied fact-checking department. Was someone asleep? Perhaps an omission does not count as an error, but… Oh, hell. When it misrepresents what happened, an omission counts as an error.