Rolling Stone sold a lot of issues, and made a big splash in journalism, by "reporting" the story of a savage gang rape undertaken at, and perpetrated by members of, the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity at the University of Virginia. As a result, the frat house was picketed and vandalized, and some of its members had to go into hiding. It, along with every other fraternity on campus, had its activities suspended without a hearing, and was compelled to undergo some kind of sex sensitivity "training."
It was a hoax. The fraternity did nothing wrong and its members did nothing wrong. It's not that the sex was consensual. It simply never happened. Apologists for the source of this fraud, one (understandably anonymous) "Jackie," still maintain that "something awful might have happened to her that night," but they provide not a shred of evidence.
They are correct, however, that something awful has happened. As with Darren Wilson and the Duke lacrosse team, an atrocious accusation got peddled and broadcast nationwide, not in the service of truth, but in the service of PC Belligerence and Self-Anointed Victims.
Don't get me wrong. Rape is a grotesque crime and should, in its most extreme form, be punishable with the death penalty, a narrow Supreme Court majority notwithstanding. (I strongly suspect that, in an irony we're not going to hear a lot about, there is a large overlap between those most opposed the death penalty for aggravated rape and those most frenetic in pushing the non-existent aggravated rape story in Rolling Stone).
My point -- one I have touched on earlier -- is that the culture seems increasingly intent on slighting real crime victims (by, for example, dumbing down the punishment of their victimizers) while it beats the drum for fake ones like "Jackie."
Why?
I think the answer is that both the dumbing down and the hoaxes serve the same end, that being to warp criminal law by infusing it with Political Correctness. While in one office of the PC skyscraper, a prominent sentencing "reform" group tells us that no sentence for anything should exceed 20 years, in the office down the hall, the magazine that made its bones as a bullhorn for pot fabricates a story to demonize today's most non-PC group, white frat boys.
Months after the damage was done, Rolling Stone now retracts the story, but with a twist: It all but exonerates the source of this pack of lies, "Jackie," saying that the "errors" lay with it, not her.
More perverse, and revealing, is the fact that accounts for the title of this entry. After signing onto many, many words detailing what Rolling Stone calls "journalistic failure," it happens that that the number of "failing" journalists Rolling Stone is going to fire is -- ready now? -- zero.
This makes sense when you think about it; indeed, it has more integrity than anything else Rolling Stone has done in this episode. Rolling Stone's whole point in spreading the fabrication was to advance its counter-cultural agenda -- an agenda it has had from its inception, designed to sap the moral confidence of the country. Its reporter, Sabrina Erdely, was doing nothing more than what her bosses had made clear, and continue to make clear, they want her to do. While they should be run out of business for dishonesty (which also won't happen), my hat is off to them for refusing to make a scapegoat out of the amoral cipher they employed for their own, long pre-existing ends.
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