Bill noted yesterday how a hoax was printed as fact to bolster a position on the campus rape debate. Before commenting on the story, let me make very clear that CJLF has a long history of supporting the rights of victims of rape. It is a terrible crime, and the victims deserve justice. We have further supported shield laws to protect victims from being revictimized. Our commitment to victims' rights remains undiminished. That said, however, the current movement regarding campus sexual assault is going to extremes that will do little to help actual victims, threatens grave consequences against people who have done nothing wrong, and may well end up hurting real victims as a backlash creates renewed skepticism of those who come forward.
Now, Rolling Stone never has been an exemplar of objective journalism, but reporting inflammatory allegations without the most elementary fact-checking is well below the standard we should expect of any national magazine. An editorial in the Wall Street Journal today pinpoints the underlying problem here:
Now, Rolling Stone never has been an exemplar of objective journalism, but reporting inflammatory allegations without the most elementary fact-checking is well below the standard we should expect of any national magazine. An editorial in the Wall Street Journal today pinpoints the underlying problem here:
The larger problem, however, is that Ms. Erderly was, by her own admission, looking for a story to fit a pre-existing narrative--in this case, the supposed epidemic of sexual assault at elite universities, along with the presumed indifference of those schools to the problem. As the Washington Post noted in an admiring profile of Ms. Erdely, she interviewed students at several elite universities before alighting on UVA, "a public school, Southern and genteel."
In other words, Ms. Erdely did not construct a story based on facts, but went looking for facts to fit her theory. She appears to have been looking for a story to fit the current popular liberal belief that sexual assault is pervasive and pervasively covered-up.
It is basic human nature to see the world through the lens of our preconceived ideas of the way things are, to scrutinize carefully any assertion contrary to those ideas, and to accept uncritically any assertion consistent with them. Professional journalists are supposed to resist this tendency, or at least they were traditionally. More and more, though, we are seeing this traditional value go by the boards.
In the UVa story, as Bill noted, the Washington Post pointed out the scandalous lapse of journalist integrity by Rolling Stone. But the Post's hands are not clean.
A couple of weeks ago I was in Reagan Airport on my way back from the Federalist Society Convention, and I was astonished to see a partisan advocacy piece printed as the headline news story in the Sunday Washington Post. The piece is not written by a Post reporter but rather by someone from the Marshall Project, billed as "a nonprofit news organization that has just launched."
As an advocate for one side, the author selectively tells the readers the points that support his predetermined position and conveniently leaves out or soft-pedals the facts that point the other way. The point the advocate wishes to make is that the statute of limitations in the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act is an "unforgiving" law, but the doctrine of equitable tolling, which courts have used to make it forgiving, is mentioned only briefly and very late in the article. Worst of all, the Supreme Court's 2013 decision in McQuiggin v. Perkins holding that equitable tolling applies to any case with proof of actual innocence is not mentioned in the story at all. That sin of omission leaves the reader with the false impression that the "unforgiving" law would leave a provably innocent person without remedy if he misses the deadline, when the truth is just the opposite.
What on earth were the Post's editors thinking? It is immediately obvious to any knowledgeable person that this is advocacy and not objective journalism. If the Post wanted to print it as an op-ed on its opinion pages, fine, though it probably should invite an opinion piece from the other side as well. But how could they possibly have printed this piece of propaganda as a news story, and the headline story at that?
In the UVa story, as Bill noted, the Washington Post pointed out the scandalous lapse of journalist integrity by Rolling Stone. But the Post's hands are not clean.
A couple of weeks ago I was in Reagan Airport on my way back from the Federalist Society Convention, and I was astonished to see a partisan advocacy piece printed as the headline news story in the Sunday Washington Post. The piece is not written by a Post reporter but rather by someone from the Marshall Project, billed as "a nonprofit news organization that has just launched."
As an advocate for one side, the author selectively tells the readers the points that support his predetermined position and conveniently leaves out or soft-pedals the facts that point the other way. The point the advocate wishes to make is that the statute of limitations in the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act is an "unforgiving" law, but the doctrine of equitable tolling, which courts have used to make it forgiving, is mentioned only briefly and very late in the article. Worst of all, the Supreme Court's 2013 decision in McQuiggin v. Perkins holding that equitable tolling applies to any case with proof of actual innocence is not mentioned in the story at all. That sin of omission leaves the reader with the false impression that the "unforgiving" law would leave a provably innocent person without remedy if he misses the deadline, when the truth is just the opposite.
What on earth were the Post's editors thinking? It is immediately obvious to any knowledgeable person that this is advocacy and not objective journalism. If the Post wanted to print it as an op-ed on its opinion pages, fine, though it probably should invite an opinion piece from the other side as well. But how could they possibly have printed this piece of propaganda as a news story, and the headline story at that?
Much less noticed, and much less ballyhooed by the WaPo, was the recent story of Hannah Graham, a University of Virginia freshman who turned up dead last month. The Post covered the story, alright, but never with the gusto and fervor it used with this week's fake fraternity rape story.
One is led to suspect that the difference in the tone and urgency of the coverage owes to the fact that the suspect in the Hannah Graham abduction with intent to defile case is a black man, Jesse L. Matthew, not white fraternity members. The WaPo article is here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/hannah-graham-cause-of-death-determined/2014/11/18/2810156c-6f37-11e4-893f-86bd390a3340_story.html
So here's the state of play: Poorly documented (indeed, in all likelihood completely fictitious) stories of white men raping a freshman coed are world-shakers, but massively documented stories of a black man abducting (and murdering) a freshman coed are just the next item on the news blotter.
Why?
Because the former fit The Reigning Liberal Narrative, and the latter embarrass it.
This is what journalism has come to.
Regarding the overreaction to campus rape, Emily Yoffe at Slate has this significant new report today: http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2014/12/college_rape_campus_sexual_assault_is_a_serious_problem_but_the_efforts.html