EDITED FOR CONTEXT:
Rolling Stone published this article detailing a vicious gang rape, it led to UVA shutting down fraternity activity briefly, and the particular frat in question got a ton of heat. Pretty quickly, the story unraveled and it's pretty clear that at least large parts of it were fabricated.
Columbia did an investigation of the journalistic processes, etc., and here's Rolling Stone's official conclusions.
http://ift.tt/1NXpgPq
Just curious what others think. I found their responses and apologies pretty weak, myself.
They continue to vilify Jackie in a way that deflects most of their responsibility and basically paints themselves as her victim. I found this pretty despicable, as Jackie may have suffered some abuse even if not how depicted, and regardless obviously has some serious problems. I also found it ironic given that they accused UVA of putting its own reputation above the well-being of abuse victims...
Worse than this, though, they refuse to admit any problem in their processes, and just default to "this is a sensitive subject matter and we had to rely on the source and that's why we missed it." How in the world is this supposed to satisfy anyone that these mistakes won't be made in the future? This plays right into the narrative of "political correctness is more important than truth," which is incredibly dangerous and fails to advance any solutions whatsoever. "No one would ever make up a story like this" is a complete non-starter to me, as is "we all found her completely credible and we are excellent judges of credibility."
Journalists, when determining whether something is substantiated enough to post, how about stopping to ask yourself, EVEN if you 100% believe your source, "what would the consequences be if this were found NOT to be true?" When you're basically relying on a single source to make extremely serious allegations against a fraternity, a university, and multiple specific individuals, this question seems so obvious to me - and I feel like if anyone had ever asked it, the story would never have been published in this form.
eta, sorry if I'm ninja'd, I did a quick search before posting but didn't find anything
Rolling Stone published this article detailing a vicious gang rape, it led to UVA shutting down fraternity activity briefly, and the particular frat in question got a ton of heat. Pretty quickly, the story unraveled and it's pretty clear that at least large parts of it were fabricated.
Columbia did an investigation of the journalistic processes, etc., and here's Rolling Stone's official conclusions.
http://ift.tt/1NXpgPq
Just curious what others think. I found their responses and apologies pretty weak, myself.
They continue to vilify Jackie in a way that deflects most of their responsibility and basically paints themselves as her victim. I found this pretty despicable, as Jackie may have suffered some abuse even if not how depicted, and regardless obviously has some serious problems. I also found it ironic given that they accused UVA of putting its own reputation above the well-being of abuse victims...
Worse than this, though, they refuse to admit any problem in their processes, and just default to "this is a sensitive subject matter and we had to rely on the source and that's why we missed it." How in the world is this supposed to satisfy anyone that these mistakes won't be made in the future? This plays right into the narrative of "political correctness is more important than truth," which is incredibly dangerous and fails to advance any solutions whatsoever. "No one would ever make up a story like this" is a complete non-starter to me, as is "we all found her completely credible and we are excellent judges of credibility."
Journalists, when determining whether something is substantiated enough to post, how about stopping to ask yourself, EVEN if you 100% believe your source, "what would the consequences be if this were found NOT to be true?" When you're basically relying on a single source to make extremely serious allegations against a fraternity, a university, and multiple specific individuals, this question seems so obvious to me - and I feel like if anyone had ever asked it, the story would never have been published in this form.
eta, sorry if I'm ninja'd, I did a quick search before posting but didn't find anything
Anyone care to defend Rolling Stone?
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