At a family gathering yesterday - my granddaughter's birthday - with a number of UVA alumni in attendance, not surprisingly the Rolling Stone hit piece on UVA came up. Equally unsurprising was the anger at Rolling Stone's irresponsible (and apparently false) story and horrific journalism - if one can even call the piece journalism. The question was how did such a terribly wrong story get published. Andrew Sullivan perhaps sums it up:
So why did an inflammatory, lurid, and apparently fallacious story get into print – with only one source and no corroboration – breaking most basic journalistic rules in a serious publication? Rich Bradley is surely right: it was a too-good-to-check story that echoed what many truly wanted to hear. It managed to suggest that the “rape culture” we are now told is endemic is even worse than you could possibly imagine, and ignored in plain sight. It implicated individuals in various stigmatized groups (among many journalists and activists) – i.e. the dreaded evil trifecta of “white”, “men” and “Southern”. Its details – from the shattered glass and the beer bottle sodomy – had an irresistible allure. Questioning it was like questioning whether Saddam Hussein actually did have WMDs – it seems as if you are excusing an evil figure, or being terminally naïve, or minimizing the danger. We believe what we want to believe – and, in our public debates, we also keep searching for the perfect anecdote or fact or story to refute our opponents for good and all.
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