Tag: Journalism

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News

Rolling Stone’s failure and the lapses that led to it

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.

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Asides

David Carr, R.I.P.

There’s a scene in “Page One,” a 2011 documentary about The New York Times, that stands out among the others. David Carr, the Times reporter who died Thursday, interviews the founders of Vice, the upstart media company that made its mark “going places we don’t belong,” according to the company’s tag line.

In the video, above, Shane Smith, the CEO and co-founder of Vice, tells Carr that Smith had been to Liberia, where he saw that people had been using the beach as a latrine and learned that some locals engaged in cannibalism.

The exchange that ensues:

Smith: “The New York Times, meanwhile, is writing about surfing. And I’m sitting going, you know what, I’m not going to talk about surfing. I’m going to talk about cannibalism. Because that [expletive] me up.”

Carr: “Just a second, time out. Before you ever went there, we’ve had reporters there reporting on genocide after genocide. Just because you put on a [expletive] safari helmet and looked at some poop doesn’t give you the right to insult what we do, so continue. Continue.”

The scene resonates with me and with many journalists with whom I’ve talked about it over the years because it demonstrates two things. That Carr had guts. And that he had the courage to call out the practice of adopting the tropes of journalism without recognizing what reporting entails.

Carr never failed to sniff out spin. He was a master at revealing the veneer of news that companies, organizations, governments and others cloak themselves in when in reality they’re advancing their mission or bolstering their bottom line. Or, as in the case of Smith, those who are quick to dismiss the work of journalists as plodding or somehow out of step, as if the hard work of pursuing the truth, of asking what the truth of the matter happens to be, somehow misses the point.

As Carr reminded us, reporting is the best job in the world. It’s a license to ask questions, to learn and to be an honest broker.

David Carr embodied what it means to be an honest broker. He also happened to be able to report thoroughly and to write beautifully. By all accounts, he seemed to be a terrific colleague. I will remember him for standing up for journalism and for telling the truth. Readers, including this one, will miss him.

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Home Life

On taking notes

In an article recently for The New Yorker, the writer John McPhee describes some of his experiences over the course of more than 50 years of interviewing people, including Special Agent Ronald Rawalt, a mineralogist from the FBI whose work in Mexico solved the murder of an American drug agent there; the actor Richard Burton, who “interviewed himself,” according to McPhee; and Alan Hume, M.D., a surgeon in Maine who “talked clearly, rapidly, volubly, and technically.”

McPhee has some advice for anyone who makes a living that involves recording what other people say. “Whatever you do, don’t rely on memory,” he writes. “Don’t imagine that you will be able to remember in the evening what people said during the day.” Good point, in my experience, as limited as it may be compared with McPhee’s. Even when I’m not on deadline, I make it a practice to read my notes the same day I’ve interviewed someone, as a way to reflect on what he or she told me, to identify gaps in my understanding and to decipher the scrawl that I tend to produce when I’m scribbling.

Lots of people take notes but journalists may be the only ones for whom writing down what other people tell us is the work itself. In December I met Bohlale Ratefane, a woman who works the lost luggage counter for South African Airways at Johannesburg’s Tambo airport. Ratefane wrote notes to herself in a black notebook with a worn cover while juggling both a BlackBerry and a smartphone. She wrote in the notebook seemingly at random, back and forth among the pages, but the system must have made sense to her because she found the entry she needed every time. She worked the notebooks and phones to perfection in pursuit of her prey, which included suitcases and passports that had become separated from their owners.

Recently I came across a story that I wrote two autumns go, during a football game between Columbia and Dartmouth that I had gone to cover for a class at journalism school. The draft had been piled among a series of notes that I’ve carried with me since then as I’ve traveled from New York City to South Africa and back.

About midway through the fourth quarter on that Saturday in October, I wandered over to the Big Green’s side of the stands, where I met Elliott Olshansky. I had sought out Olshansky because he and a cluster of fans cheered for Dartmouth on nearly every play. As it happened, Olshansky graduated from Dartmouth in 2004 and aspired to be a writer and an entrepreneur. “I’m in this weird limbo between where I am and where I want to be,” he told me.

I liked his comment and used it in my first draft of the story. My professor also liked the comment but suggested that I discard it nonetheless. “It doesn’t really advance your central point,” he wrote in tracked changes through the middle of the paragraph. My professor was right about the quote. The story was tighter without it.

Still, I’m glad I’ve preserved that first draft of the story long enough to read Olshansky’s comment anew. That’s because the in-between state that Olshansky described himself as occupying has become a home of sorts to me. I’ve recently returned to New York from South Africa to work on a project that combines my training in law and journalism. But I also look forward in August to returning to South Africa, where there are stories that I want to report and write, and where my partner lives and works.

When I met Olshansky he had recently published an e-book about the rules of dating from a guy’s perspective. “Guy-lit,” according to Olshansky, who also was pursuing an MBA at Fordham. Aspiring entrepreneur and writer – that was where Olshansky stood as we parted on that sunny afternoon, when I did not yet realize his observation might one day resonate with me.

Writing in my notebook what Olshansky said and discovering the quote anew 18 months later underscores for me another reason one writes things down in the first place. Mostly we take notes to remember, but the notes that we take also help us to see things in new ways. Our drafts may be a means to an end, but they become a part of us too.