Ha, watch out! Another classic example of a lib “journalist” trying to sound intelligent but coming across as a doofus.
This is an actual paragraph that @ebruenig wrote. http://t.co/mkXUVA0pyZ pic.twitter.com/HM7M3PMnqC
— Ben Howe (@BenHowe) April 6, 2015
Please…
Via The New Republic:
If you type in the original page for Rolling Stone’s December 2014 story “A Rape on Campus: The Struggle for Justice at UVA,” you’ll be redirected to “What Went Wrong?,” a report about the article published Sunday by the Columbia Journalism Review. Rolling Stone officially retracted its blockbuster story, which had garnered more than 2.7 million views. The retraction comes on the heels of the Charlottesville Police Department’s announcement that there was not enough evidence to pursue an investigation of the story’s titular rape, which now appears to have been something between a delusion and a hoax.
What did go wrong? A whole host of things, most of them probably more interesting to journalists than readers. There were dazzling editorial oversights, like the decision not to contact the three friends allegedly present on the night of the assault, and mundane human error, like the assumption that everyone who had heard Jackie’s story had been told the same tale. Still, the mother of all these blunders seems to have predated the article’s eventual litany of technical failures. Sabrina Rubin Erdely, the investigative journalist and true-crime writer who penned the essay, set out with an answer in search of a question, a conclusion about systematic indifference to rape which she needed the right story to backfill. If she had written a fictional account of a rape that met all her article’s needs, I can’t imagine it would have been too different than the horrifying one that issued from Jackie, which should have set off alarm bells then.