Had Rolling Stone adhered to some basics of journalism the magazine might have avoided publishing the story of a student at the University of Virginia whose account of being raped at a fraternity on campus proved to be unreliable.
That’s the conclusion of a report published Sunday by Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Rolling Stone commissioned the school to investigate its handling of the story, which the magazine published in Nov. 2014.
“Rolling Stone’s repudiation of the main narrative in ‘A Rape on Campus’ is a story of journalistic failure that was avoidable,” write Sheila Coronel, Steve Coll and Derek Kravitz, the report’s authors. “The failure encompassed reporting, editing, editorial supervision and fact-checking. The magazine set aside or rationalized as unnecessary essential practices of reporting that, if pursued, would likely have led the magazine’s editors to reconsider publishing [the woman’s] narrative so prominently, if at all.”
“The published story glossed over the gaps in the magazine’s reporting by using pseudonyms and by failing to state where important information had come from,” they add.
The report is illuminative for anyone who performs acts of journalism. Over the course of nearly 13,000 words, the authors recount the process by which Rolling Stone reported, edited and checked — or failed to check — the story, which details an assault on a woman named Jackie that she charged took place in Sept. 2012.
According to the report, Jackie told the reporter, Sabrina Rubin Erdeley, that she was assaulted by a group of men at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity. Jackie told Erdeley that she was invited to the fraternity by a co-worker named Drew, who according to Jackie coached seven others as they raped her one by one. Like Jackie, Drew is a pseudonym. Jackie became unresponsive to Erdeley when the latter asked Jackie about Drew’s identity. Eventually, Erdeley and her editors stopped trying to find him.
A similar reliance on pseudonyms undermined Rolling Stone’s failure to contact three friends of Jackie’s who Jackie claimed found her in the early hours of the morning immediately following the rape. For the story, Erdeley attributed quotes to each of the friends that Jackie had supplied. Erdeley noted as much in a draft of the story she filed with her editors.
Despite discussions between Erdeley and her editor about the need to confirm the account with the friends, the editor eventually approved the pseudonyms, not wanting, he told the Columbia reporters, to protect the friends from being identified with the “self-involved patter” that Jackie said they engaged in.
The Columbia report ends with a series of recommendations that, while specific to Rolling Stone and the story at issue, underscore practices that make sense for journalists everywhere.
They include an obligation to provide the subjects of our reporting with sufficient details that allow them to respond fully to charges, to surface and address inconsistencies, and to forbear from using pseudonyms, which can relieve reporters from asking questions that accuracy demands and distance readers from the identity of a source.
More generally, the report recommends that news outlets balance the sensitivity to alleged victims of sexual assault with the demand to verify information. In the end, verification aids survivors. According to the authors:
Because questioning a victim’s account can be traumatic, counselors have cautioned journalists to allow survivors some control over their own stories. This is good advice. Yet it does survivors no good if reporters documenting their cases avoid rigorous practices of verification. That may only subject the victim to greater scrutiny and skepticism.
None of the above is to suggest there’s anything intuitive or easy about the story that Rolling Stone set out to report. Or that the magazine doesn’t have journalists who work hard to report stories accurately and who, in most instances, report them well. As the investigators at Columbia write, “the pattern of [Rolling Stone’s] failure draws a map of how to do better.”
Though the lapses may belong to Rolling Stone, the lessons seem like a reminder for all of us.