Report is out, interesting read link below) . The article was a massive failure but they did own up to the mistakes per preface to article quoted below under the link.
I’m a UVA alum. This massive mea culpa, honest in intent as I’m sure it is, doesn’t really address my biggest problem with the story. They actually said a few times in the narrative that the story was really about the scourge of campus rape at all colleges. It was not.
They didn’t single out UVA because it hit some metric for being the worst or because it was a really telling example of the systemic failures to rape victims of all colleges; they singled out UVA because this particularly massive atrocity was met with indifference by the police and the administration. It was met with indifference because, according to several sources other than this article, it was never even reported, and because it never happened.
How they picked “Jackie” out as the most credible rape survivor at UVA was not adequately addressed. Any of the (apparently) dozens of other rape victims in Charlottesville would have been happy to say “Here’s the guy’s name, here’s who I told afterwards, call them at will.”
The original print story had a particularly smarmy coda about how the University was founded by Thomas Jefferson, who’d had a 14-year-old sex slave in no real position to give consent to a sexual relationship. Maybe their next rape expose should be about rock stars, because that descriptor could be applied just as accurately to Jimmy Page, a frequent subject of fawning RS articles.
It was (a version of it at least) reported to the UVA admins by “Jackie” prior to the Rolling Stone story but (as with Rolling Stone) she gave no names or details that the university could follow up on and she did not cooperate with their additional attempts to get details.
I’d say this pretty much confirms what we’ve suspected for some time now - Rolling Stone, at pretty much every level in the journalistic process, placed too much faith in a single source (whose behavior as described here is even dodgier than I’d read in the past) and refused to look in directions that would call her account into question because they felt they had an important message to get out.
I’d like to hope that this case is one that’s studied by journalism students in the future to teach the importance of some of the axioms of journalism that this generation seems to have forgotten; always fact-check your sources, always get every side of the story, don’t place too much trust in a single source, don’t let the message get in the way of the facts, and, when in doubt, slow down.
Along that line it’s interesting how fact verification was institutionally supine across the board. The amusing assertion the Rolling Stone players made at the end re “Our fact checking institutions and methodologies are great and do not need to be changed… we just need to use them”.