That’s either a ridiculously naive statement or a nae true Scotsman.
Besides, even otherwise competent people have to pay a price when there’s a really major f**k-up. You graduated top 10% from Annapolis, have written brilliant papers at the Naval Institute, you have medals for bravery, your crew loves you… Then you accidentally torpedo the Staten Island ferry. You’ll be commanding a desk in Wyoming for the next couple of years if you’re lucky.
How about this: Grotesque incompetence that potentially ruins lives and opens up your news-outlet for lawsuits and destroys whatever reputation for integrity your news-outlet had is grounds for firing. Especially when the merest nod in the general direction of due-diligence wasn’t performed.
And yes, her editor should also be fired. And all the way up the ladder. Anyone who let this story through and was between this ‘reporter’ and the printing-press hitting the paper should be out on their ass.
This isn’t a minor grammatical error, this is a catastrophic screw-up where not one person even though of the idea of checking anything. It’s a bank-teller giving out a million dollars in change rather than a dollar. The doctor who gives 10 oz of adrenaline rather than 10ccs.
You don’t seem to get the difference between minor, “anyone can make them” errors which happen all the time to everyone and huge fuck-ups made through laziness, corruption and incompetence.
You can libel a corporation (maybe it will be called defamation or something else but amounts to the same thing):
Also, damages do not necessarily have to be proven.
I’m a reporter. I decide in advance to write a story proclaiming that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. I call eight people until I find one willing to allege she saw a Kenyan birth certificate. I don’t ask her to show me the certificate. I don’t do 20 minutes of research which would show me that the office in Nairobi where she claims to have seen the certificate was closed for a public holiday on the day she says she was in Kenya, or that the public records clerk whose name and picture she supplied has a name that doesn’t appear to exist anywhere else and bears a picture taken from the Facebook profile of a person with another name who doesn’t live in Kenya or work in public records. She claims that she had to bribe five people to see the certificate, though later changes this to seven.
When challenged that this story doesn’t make any sense and shown that other media outlets have easily debunked it with just minutes of investigation, I accuse everyone who is pointing out the obvious of being a “Kenyan president apologist” and perpetuating “election fraud culture” for months, before finally claiming that a “master fabulist” hoodwinked me and I should not bear any responsibility for the erroneous story or be fired from my job as an investigative reporter.
Does anyone defending Erdley now think this is acceptable?
Both the authors of the Columbia article and the police seem to be believe that something did happen to Jackie. The story she initially reported to UVA authorities differed substantially from the one that she told to Rolling Stone. It looks like she may have taken an incident that disturbed her and blown it up into something entirely different, without realizing the consequences. It’s possible that she felt that the fraternity story would gather her more attention and sympathy from the boy in question (one of the people she went to after the alleged incident), than the true story, which may have been more ambiguous.
They say they “can’t rule out that something happened” which is metaphysically true. However, whatever happened didn’t happen at that frat and didn’t involve Haven Monahan; it’s been proven that the frat hosted no even that night and Haven Monahan isn’t a real person.
Sure, without 24/7 drone surveillance of a person, we can never say with 100% certainty that they were not a victim of some crime in some timeframe. But that’s not really relevant to the fact that the particular accusations made here were, conclusively and certainly, fabricated.
Brilliant analogy.
Did anyone say it was?
My personal theory is Jackie was doing poorly at school so fabricated this story as a means to not get in trouble for bad grades.
The bad grades and coincidental timing of her claim are in evidence:
You’re tap dancing pretty hard here, Ascenray, maybe you should step back and take a couple of deep breaths.
The question I was answering was why did the accuser make up the story. And I think the fact that that something did happen to her is very relevant to that question. According to the Columbia report, a sexual assault at the fraternity was reported. It took place at an earlier date than the one claimed in Rolling Stone.
The existence of this earlier different incident does not excuse the fabrication of the later one, or the incompetence of Rolling Stone. The earlier incident may not have happened either. But I think the evidence is a lot more substantial than just “some crime in some timeframe,” and I think it does go some way to explaining why the accuser made the accusations she did.
Yes, there are several people on this page who think it’s acceptable to decline to fire someone who acted as I described.
The evidence that some kind of assault happened at all is not substantial. The police did a thorough (in this case) investigation into the incident. They found no evidence an assault occurred.
Not firing someone doesn’t mean their behavior was acceptable.
You mean the honor code of not lying to a major publication accusing a whole frat and the culture of the school of being rape happy? Of causing a 5 month police investigation making the frat and the school look bad because of said lie?
Monetary losses like alumni declining to give money to the school or to the frat. Loss of future income because people do not want to go to a school with a culture of being tolerant of rape. Like of the cook of the frat losing his job because they shut that chapter down.
You don’t think the RS article accusing the frat and the school of being rape happy hurt eithers reputation?
I hope the frat sues RS, the school sues RS and that cook that lost his job sues RS and I hope they get enough to seriously hurt RS as a business.
That’s not even close to saying that what happened was alright.
Ha ha!
Not likely. At some institutes of higher learning, she’d probably get course credit for falsely accusing men of violent felonies.
The frat has already said it will sue Rolling Stone. I would be surprised if the school doesn’t sue.
UVA’s Phi Kappa Psi to sue Rolling Stone for ‘reckless’ rape story
To be fair, those Staten Islanders probably deserved it.