# Columbia Graduate School of Journalism report or Rolling Stone UVA article - Interesting read **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [April 6, 2015, 5:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/columbia-graduate-school-of-journalism-report-or-rolling-stone-uva-article-interesting-read/716945 "2015-04-06T05:29:47Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 8\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![astro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/9dc877/32.png) [@astro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/astro)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2015, 5:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/columbia-graduate-school-of-journalism-report-or-rolling-stone-uva-article-interesting-read/716945/1 "2015-04-06T05:29:47Z")
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. [Rolling Stone and UVA: The Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism Report](http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/a-rape-on-campus-what-went-wrong-20150405) > [@](#): > > A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR: Last November, we published a story, ‘A Rape on Campus’ [RS 1223], that centered around a University of Virginia student’s horrifying account of her alleged gang rape at a campus fraternity house. Within days, commentators started to question the veracity of our narrative. Then, when The Washington Post uncovered details suggesting that the assault could not have taken place the way we described it, the truth of the story became a subject of national controversy. > > As we asked ourselves how we could have gotten the story wrong, we decided the only responsible and credible thing to do was to ask someone from outside the magazine to investigate any lapses in reporting, editing and fact-checking behind the story. We reached out to Steve Coll, dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter himself, who accepted our offer. We agreed that we would cooperate fully, that he and his team could take as much time as they needed and write whatever they wanted. They would receive no payment, and we promised to publish their report in full. (A condensed version of the report will appear in the next issue of the magazine, out April 8th.) > > This report was painful reading, to me personally and to all of us at Rolling Stone. It is also, in its own way, a fascinating document — a piece of journalism, as Coll describes it, about a failure of journalism. With its publication, we are officially retracting ‘A Rape on Campus.’ We are also 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. Sexual assault is a serious problem on college campuses, and it is important that rape victims feel comfortable stepping forward. It saddens us to think that their willingness to do so might be diminished by our failings. > > Will Dana, Managing Editor ---
**Author:** ![rowrrbazzle](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rowrrbazzle/32/414_2.png) [@rowrrbazzle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rowrrbazzle)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2015, 5:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/columbia-graduate-school-of-journalism-report-or-rolling-stone-uva-article-interesting-read/716945/2 "2015-04-06T05:45:30Z")
> [@](#): > > The fat Russian agent was cornering all the foreign refugees in turn and explaining plausibly that this whole affair was an Anarchist plot. I watched him with some interest, for it was the first time that I had seen a person whose profession was telling lies—unless one counts journalists. –George Orwell, “Homage to Catalonia” (1938) > [@](#): > > Early in life I have noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and **eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened**. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’. –George Orwell, “Looking Back on the Spanish War” (1943) ---
**Author:** ![Horatio\_Hellpop](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/e5b9ba/32.png) [@Horatio\_Hellpop](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Horatio_Hellpop)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2015, 9:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/columbia-graduate-school-of-journalism-report-or-rolling-stone-uva-article-interesting-read/716945/3 "2015-04-06T09:25:52Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Crotalus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/crotalus/32/41_2.png) [@Crotalus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Crotalus)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2015, 11:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/columbia-graduate-school-of-journalism-report-or-rolling-stone-uva-article-interesting-read/716945/4 "2015-04-06T11:31:56Z")
> [@rowrrbazzle](#): > > –George Orwell, “Homage to Catalonia” (1938) > > –George Orwell, “Looking Back on the Spanish War” (1943) Great, apposite quotes. I’m impressed that you came up with them so quickly. ---
**Author:** ![astro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/9dc877/32.png) [@astro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/astro)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2015, 3:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/columbia-graduate-school-of-journalism-report-or-rolling-stone-uva-article-interesting-read/716945/5 "2015-04-06T15:05:35Z")
> [@Horatio\_Hellpop](#): > > 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.” 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. > [@](#): > > According to the Charlottesville police, Jackie did meet with assistant dean of students Nicole Eramo on May 20, 2013. During that meeting, Jackie described her assault differently than she did later for Erdely, the police said, declining to provide details. According to members of the UVA community knowledgeable about the case, who asked not to be identified in order to speak about confidential university matters, Jackie recounted to Eramo the same story she had told her friends on the night of Sept. 28: She was forced to have oral sex with several men while at a fraternity party. Jackie did not name the fraternity where the assault occurred or provide names or details about her attackers, the sources said. No mention was made of hazing. (Citing student privacy and ongoing investigations, the UVA administration, through its communications office, declined to answer questions about the case.) ---
**Author:** ![Smapti](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/smapti/32/17938_2.png) [@Smapti](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smapti)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2015, 4:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/columbia-graduate-school-of-journalism-report-or-rolling-stone-uva-article-interesting-read/716945/6 "2015-04-06T16:39:01Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![astro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/9dc877/32.png) [@astro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/astro)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2015, 5:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/columbia-graduate-school-of-journalism-report-or-rolling-stone-uva-article-interesting-read/716945/7 "2015-04-06T17:30:15Z")
> [@Smapti](#): > > 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”. ---
**Author:** ![billfish678](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7bcc69/32.png) [@billfish678](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/billfish678)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2015, 5:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/columbia-graduate-school-of-journalism-report-or-rolling-stone-uva-article-interesting-read/716945/8 "2015-04-06T17:56:23Z")
> [@astro](#): > > 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”. Funny thing is they probably think that makes them sound not as bad a they could be. Bad - Our process has some holes in it and we need to fix that. Worse - We were too fucking stupid / lazy / politically correct / agenda driven / blinded by money and fame to follow our process. Jackasses.