Rolling Stone vs. UVA

The seemingly much deserved trashing of Rolling Stone continues after its story of an alleged gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity began to unravel and headed toward being categorized as either a fabricate lie or the fantasy of a emotionally disturbed young woman who has admitted that she never wanted to attend UVA.  Now, Politico joins the fray and beings its piece by calling the Rolling Stone story "journalistic malpractice."  Meanwhile, as noted before, the would be heroines of women's rights have done huge harm to the cause they claim to support.  The lesson is that just because you'd like a story to be true because it furthers one's agenda, doesn't mean you don't still have to diligently fact check it.  Here are excerpts from Politico:

The Rolling Stone story about a gang rape at the University of Virginia has, in the eyes of many in the media, gone from bombshell reporting to journalistic malpractice in the bat of an eye.

The details of this crime are practically unspeakable. The shock of it led many people to recoil in horror upon the article’s release and ask, “How could this have happened at such a respectable school?” Upon further reflection, and after a skeptical blog post by Worth Editor Richard Bradley, people began to ask, “Could this really have happened?”

First, there’s the scale of the crime. No one doubts the existence of sociopaths on campus, but nine of them conspiring together at one fraternity in an act so depraved it could be something out of a West African civil war?

Then, there are the details. If the gang rape was premeditated, why did the fraternity brothers leave a glass table in the room, which Jackie was smashed through in the initial attack, with the subsequent assaults taking place on the shards?

Would Jackie’s friends, seeing her bruised, cut and traumatized, really have stood around debating how it would affect their social status if she dared report the crime?

In fact, even the writer of the article doesn’t seem to know if the story is true.  Sabrina Rubin Erdely has said she found Jackie credible. But she didn’t talk to the accused students. She explained in a Slate podcast that she couldn’t get in touch with the alleged perpetrators “because [the fraternity’s] contact page was pretty outdated.” She wouldn’t tell the Washington Post whether she even knew their names, and retreated to the argument that the real point of the story wasn’t the violent incident itself, but the culture of UVA.

Almost as shocking as the original incident is the fact that Jackie never reported it to the police. If Rolling Stone is to be believed, the UVA administration didn’t really encourage her to do so, and even as she was talking to the magazine for a report that would make national waves, she still hadn’t reported her tormentors to law enforcement.

Even considering her trauma and fragile psychological state, this is an extraordinary lapse. By her account, Phi Kappa Psi isn’t a fraternity so much as a criminal gang committed to sexual violence.

Bizarrely, prosecution of rapists isn’t particularly high on the list of priorities of many of the same feminists who reflexively credit the UVA story. The feminist agenda on campus rape has two elements. It aims to define ambiguous sexual encounters as rape at the same time it seeks to empower college administrations, instead of the criminal justice system, to handle sexual assault allegations.

In a compelling piece for the New York Times a couple of weeks ago, Jed Rubenfeld of Yale Law School explained why both ends of this equation are wrong. The new standard for sexual consent — spelled out in elaborate campus rules governing every step of a sexual encounter — “encourages people to think of themselves as sexual assault victims when there was no assault.”

Schools should be encouraging victims to go to the police, as befits any other crime. No one would ever think to handle an armed robbery with a campus hearing and a disciplinary slap on the wrist. Rapists are violent criminals, and if victims are understandably reluctant to report them to the police, colleges and local police forces should be doing everything they reasonably can to make it easier for them to do so.

The other campus imperative should be better controlling the alcohol-fueled party scene that has become an entitlement of young adulthood in America. Much of what feminists call rape culture is what Heather Mac Donald, in a characteristically brilliant essay for The Weekly Standard, deems “a squalid hook-up scene, the result of jettisoning all normative checks on promiscuous behavior.”

At UVA, the priority should be getting to the truth of Jackie’s story, and either holding accountable the guilty parties, or debunking a calumny.

For the record and in the interest of full disclosure, I was in a fraternity at UVA (pictured below) and had many friends at the nearby Kappa Sigma house.

My former fraternity at UVA - across Rugby Road from Phi Kappa Psi

How a Victim Culture Gone Mad Harms Real Victims

Not to beat a dead horse, but in follow up to the last post, a piece in The Daily Beast - authored by a woman - looks at the risks of jumping on the band wagon of every self-professed victim without at least pausing to make sure the alleged facts and the story line match up with objective facts.  With two daughters and a grand daughter, I am certainly sensitive to women's issues and hold a deep disgust for those (typically heterosexual males) who physically and/or sexually abuse woman. But, perhaps due to the attorney in me, I know that it is critical to check out the facts.  Blindly believing your client without asking hard questions can leave one to find themselves ambushed in court or torn apart in an opposing counsel's brief.  The same holds true in journalism (which, by the way, I believe includes blogging - especially since readers will quickly tell me when I'm wrong) and is something Rolling Stone and Fox News need to learn.  Here are highlights from The Daily Beast article:

When Rolling Stone first published its explosive story detailing UVA student Jackie’s alleged gang-rape by seven fraternity brothers, few in the mainstream media doubted its veracity.

And by giving blind faith to Jackie’s story, Erdely obfuscated some of the truth, leading Rolling Stone to acknowledge “discrepancies in Jackie’s account” on Friday.

[I]n valorizing Jackie’s trauma as a victim of rape (never mind that she was and remains an alleged victim), Rolling Stone ignored glaring holes in a story that was too good to check.

Erdely’s story did damage to University of Virginia’s reputation, but more importantly, the story has done a tragic disservice to other victims of sexual violence who might be prevented from coming forward out of fear that their stories will have to withstand the scrutiny and default skepticism of police, university officials, and reporters.

Rolling Stone should be shamed for egregiously poor reporting, failing to fact-check important details like the date of the night Jackie claimed she was violently raped for three hours in a Phi Kappa Psi frat house (the fraternity did not, in fact, host a party that evening).

But of the hundreds of thousands, including journalists, who read the Rolling Stone story, few noticed Erdely’s failure to interview any of the seven men who participated in the attack on Jackie or corroborate many of the other easily corroborated details she reported.

When journalists did scrutinize what they viewed as weak and one-sided reporting, they were met with accusations of victim-blaming.
When Worth magazine editor-in-chief Richard Bradley voiced his skepticism in a blogpost, he was immediately declared a “UVA truther” by New York magazine contributing writer Marin Cogan, who compared him to 9/11 conspiracy theorists for even questioning Erdely’s story, despite including plenty of caveats that she might be telling the truth.

Cogan has since apologized for using the term and acknowledged she was wrong about the UVA story.

Jezebel’s Anna Marian attacked Reason writer Robby Soave for taking a similar stance as Bradley (in Marian’s words, Coave “takes Bradley’s giant ball of shit and runs with it.”) Marian too has since apologized, acknowledging that she was “dead fucking wrong.”

But others, like feminist writer Amanda Marcotte, have merely shifted focus to how “rape apologists” will greet the news of Rolling Stone’s admission of their report’s shortcomings, while still believing Jackie’s story . . . 

The lesson Marcotte drew from the magazine’s climbdown was that it was “interesting that rape apologists think that if they can ‘discredit’ one rape story, that means no other rape stories can be true, either.” She cited no examples. While others were debating the failings of Rolling Stone’s process, Marcotte was railing against “rape apologists [who] are so sure rapes are hoaxes...”

Still others attempted to turn the focus away from Jackie onto the magazine that credulously told her story. 

Of course Rolling Stone’s reputation should—and has—suffered from the Jackie debacle. And it will likely have a disastrous effect on Erdely’s career.

But writers like Marcotte and Valenti still cast Jackie as a victim, despite the growing evidence casting serious doubt on her story.

We live in a culture that valorizes victims—where to question one woman’s claims of sexual abuse is to be a “rape apologist,” someone who effectively dismisses heinous crime under any and all circumstances. If Jackie is lying, she will likely—and sadly—suffer for it. And she has already put herself in an unenviable position by reaffirming her version of events as described to Rolling Stone in a subsequent interview with the Washington Post.

The problem with valorizing the victim, as a “victim culture” does, is that anything that runs contrary to the victim’s narrative is cast as an attack on that person.

Question them, and you are colluding in exacerbating the awful effects of their trauma. Question their actions or motives and you are “victim shaming” and “victim blaming.” Of course, the flip-side of a victim is a bully, and it is notable that today, everyone rushes to be a victim—the right wing under attack from the left, the left under attack from the right, bigots still seeking to attack gay people, and claiming they cannot voice their bigotry.

The sad consequence of a culture of victimhood is that it obscures real victims and obscures the genuinely felt experiences of those victims, whatever they have endured.

I often bemoan the fact that we have so little good investigative reporting nowadays.  Perhaps, that is what Erdely thought she was doing.  But by not doing her fact checking and corroborating statements easily verifiable, she ended up acting no better than Fox News and pushing the story she perhaps wished was true and most certainly wanted readers to believe was true.  She did a huge disservice to everyone.