1. Rolling Stone failed to follow solid reporting practices, failing to gain independent verification of any of the story’s elements and, in the process, pretending that a single source was good enough for a 9,000-word piece designed to demonstrate how American universities are not handling rape accusations properly.
The publication of “A Rape On Campus” prompted protests on campus, but soon fraternity members and people who knew Jackie began to come forward disputing her account. The fraternity did not hold a party on the night in 2012 she said she was raped, and none of its members matched the description of her attacker. Her friends later told reporters their memories also didn’t match up with the Rolling Stone story. The magazine never contacted them before publication, they told the Washington Post.
The Columbia report identified this failure by Erdely and her editors as the most critical.
“In hindsight, 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,” the report said. “That was the reporting path, if taken, that would have almost certainly led the magazine’s editors to change plans.”
2. The magazine, even as it offers its mea culpas, continues to point the finger at its source, calling her a fabulist and manipulator.
Here is Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone founder and its current and long-time publisher, discussing the Columbia report with he Times:
The problems with the article started with its source, Mr. Wenner said. He described her as “a really expert fabulist storyteller” who managed to manipulate the magazine’s journalism process. When asked to clarify, he said that he was not trying to blame Jackie, “but obviously there is something here that is untruthful, and something sits at her doorstep.”
From a journalism standpoint, this is nonsense. Sources lie all the time. They misremember. They make things up. Our job as reporters is to sort through the stories as we collect information from multiple sources in an attempt to verify. Sometimes, we are successful — Rolling Stone has done some very good work over the years and still has a solid reporting team in place — and sometimes we fail. But our failures should never be based on a lack of reporting. And that is what happened here.
Perhaps “Jackie” did “manipulate the magazine’s journalism process,” as Wenner says. But that is mostly because the process was flawed, as other Rolling Stone staffers involved in the story admit. I think that’s always a possibility — we have to start by believing women who say they were raped, but before we run their stories in our magazines or on our websites, we should make a concerted effort to verify those stories. If we can’t — well, that raises a set of other questions. Why not? What impediments may exist that prevent verification? Do we have enough to at least support the accusations? What other voices do we need in the story? Should we run the story with a counter-narrative to show that there are doubts? And so on.
There need to be strong processes in place to ensure all questions are asked and answered before anything moves forward. Columbia apparently found that it wasn’t the case at Rolling Stone, at least on this story, which is why Rolling Stone has to bear the blame for what went wrong.
Everyone makes mistakes — Rolling Stone is not alone in this and piling on is far from useful. It also is not useful to point the finger at “Jackie” — that is a different issue, a different story. This story is one of journalistic failures. Rolling Stone deserves credit for inviting in an outside “investigator” and opening its processes up for review. It deserves credit for publishing the full report on its site and a long excerpt in print. The hope is that it fixes the flawed processes identified in the report and that other news organizations can learn from Rolling Stone’s mistakes.
The hope is that we can prevent these kinds of mistakes in the future. Wenner’s comments, however, leave me wondering if that is possible.
Hank Kalet 