It was clear when the Charlottesville police department announced that it had found “no substantive proof” to support the UVA gang rape detailed in Rolling Stone’s “A Rape on Campus: A Brutal Assault and Struggle for Justice at UVA,” that the magazine had made some serious mistakes in its reporting. As a result, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism was tasked with investigating the magazine’s story in order to figure out just where Rolling Stone went wrong. The report, which is being called “a piece of journalism about a failure of journalism,” outlines a list of fundamental journalistic failures on individual, procedural, and institutional levels. The controversy has forced Rolling Stone to issue a formal retraction.
Rolling Stone writer Sabrina Rubin Erdely began her article intending to showcase the pervasiveness of rape culture on college campuses using the story of an alleged gang rape survivor known as Jackie. Jackie’s horrific story of sexual assault and her campus administration’s lack of action resonated with readers and launched a national dialogue about rape. But just a few weeks after the story was published, details from Jackie’s story were called into question, leading to a formal police investigation into the alleged rape. While police found that they could not authenticate Jackie’s claims detailed in the article, they did not refute that something had potentially happened to her.
Columbia University followed suit with its own investigation in order to uncover what faulty journalistic practices led to such a scandal. The group summarized their findings writing:
Rolling Stone‘s repudiation of the main narrative in ‘A Rape on Campus’ is a story of journalistic failure that was avoidable. 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 Jackie’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.
While a combination of failures including fact checking and corroboration attributed to the article’s inauthenticity, the takeaway is that Rolling Stone’s fundamental mistake was that they trusted Jackie way too much. The article’s editor Sean Woods claimed they were “too deferential” to their rape victim stating:
We honored too many of her requests in our reporting. We should have been much tougher, and in not doing that, we maybe did her a disservice.
Working with rape victims can be understandably challenging, especially when there’s the potential to re-traumatize them by having them retell specific events. Despite this, there still needs to be a way to hold sources accountable while preserving journalistic integrity. Rolling Stone failed to provide a balanced account of the events by only featuring the victim’s side of the story. This misstep now opens the door for other articles’ authenticities to be questioned, especially those written by Erdely, or others involving anecdotal evidence.
Surprisingly Erdely and her editors will not lose their jobs even in light of the report’s findings–apparently Rolling Stone views the report’s public embarrassment as punishment enough. However, that decision may not stand with an impending lawsuit against the publication on behalf of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity in the works. Publicly Rolling Stone needs to prove that its credibility remains after this massive disservice to journalistic integrity.