JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC

You could see this coming four months ago: The Rolling Stone story’s about “Jackie,” the otherwise anonymous University of Virginia student who claimed to have been gang raped at a fraternity party has officially and completely blown up in the magazine’s face.

Rolling Stone today retracted the story and published on its website a 13,000-word report written by three people with the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. Rolling Stone asked the journalism school to investigate the story last December, after other publications, including the Washington Post, raised significant questions about its credibility.

The journalism school’s report said the magazine failed to engage in “basic, even routine journalistic practice” to verify details of the alleged assault, which supposedly occurred at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house on Sept. 28, 2012.

The Rolling Stone writer, Sabrina Rubin Erdely. relied almost exclusively on Jackie’s account and made only token attempts to verify it.

In abandoning basic journalistic methods, Erdely not only anonymously quoted three of Jackie’s former friends who supposedly knew about the assault but also used quotes, supposedly from the friends, that Jackie provided. Erdely didn’t get the quotes herself; she let Jackie put words in their mouths and published those words!

Jackie refused to give Erdely the full names of the three friends, and Erdely did not attempt to independently contact them. The writer and her principal editor, Sean Woods, got around the identity problem by using pseudonyms for the friends. They did the same thing for the alleged organizer of the gang rape, a man Erdely referred to as “Drew,” whom Erdely inquired about but also failed to contact.   

Failing to contact the friends, the investigative report said, was a key element in the story’s faulty foundation.

“In hindsight,” the report said, “the most consequential decision Rolling Stone made was to accept that Erdely had not contacted the three friends who spoke with Jackie on the night she said she was raped. That was the reporting path, if taken, that would have almost certainly led the magazine’s editors to change plans.”

**

I wrote about this back in December, when Rolling Stone acknowledged that there were “discrepancies” between Jackie’s account and facts that had been uncovered since the article appeared.

In response to a comment at the bottom of that post, I wrote this sentence: 

My guess is that Jann Wenner, co-founder of the magazine and still the editor in chief, will fire just about everyone who was involved in reporting and editing the story.

Unbelievably, astonishingly, Wenner told The New York Times that no one would lose their jobs — not Erdely, not Woods, not managing editor Will Dana, who raised no objections.

The Times said that Wenner “acknowledged the piece’s flaws but said that it represented an isolated and unusual episode.”

For his part, Dana said the following in a three-paragraph introduction to the Columbia School of Journalism report:

“We are…committing ourselves to a series of recommendations about journalistic practices that are spelled out in the report. We would like to apologize to our readers and to all of those who were damaged by our story and the ensuing fallout, including members of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity and UVA administrators and students.”

Tonight, I read the Columbia report, and it is appalling.

Consider this excerpt, for example:

Stronger policy and clearer staff understanding in at least three areas might have changed the final outcome:

Pseudonyms…Pseudonyms are inherently undesirable in journalism. They introduce fiction and ask readers to trust that this is the only instance in which a publication is inventing details at its discretion. Their use in this case was a crutch – it allowed the magazine to evade coming to terms with reporting gaps. Rolling Stone should consider banning them. If its editors believe pseudonyms are an indispensable tool for its forms of narrative writing, the magazine should consider using them much more rarely and only after robust discussion about alternatives, with dissent encouraged.

Checking Derogatory Information. Erdely and Woods made the fateful agreement not to check with the three friends. If the fact-checking department had understood that such a practice was unacceptable, the outcome would almost certainly have changed.

The report also lambasted Woods, the principal editor, and Dana, the managing editor.

Of Woods, the report said:

“Sean Woods…might have prevented the effective retraction of Jackie’s account by pressing his writer to close the gaps in her reporting. He started his career in music journalism but had been editing complex reported features at Rolling Stone for years. Investigative reporters working on difficult, emotive or contentious stories often have blind spots. It is up to their editors to insist on more phone calls, more travel, more time, until the reporting is complete. Woods did not do enough.”

Of Dana, it said:

“Dana might have looked more deeply into the story drafts he read, spotted the reporting gaps and insisted that they be fixed. He did not.”

**

What a horrible day for journalism. And, perhaps more important, what a fateful day for Rolling Stone.

By itself, the phony story would have badly damaged Rolling Stone’s credibility for a long time to come. But by failing to fire any or all of the three principal players in this journalistic fraud — the writer, the story editor and the managing editor — the magazine has effectively followed its admission of cheating with a kick to the readers’ and the public’s face.

For me, an Arizona resident summed it up best in a comment posted on The New York Times’ website:

“It’s pretty obvious that nobody at Rolling Stone thinks they actually did anything wrong. This should disqualify them from ever being considered a ‘news source’ again.”