Imagine I tell a reporter I am the victim of a crime–let’s say a car-jacking. I explain how some clowns from a circus were the perpetrators. Lastly, I ask the reporter not to contact the clowns. Wouldn’t you be in disbelief if the reporter went ahead and wrote this one-sided story, without doing simple fact-checking like 1) seeing if the circus was even in town that day or 2) if I even owned a car?
That’s apparently what happened when Rolling Stone Magazine reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely wrote on an alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia. According to a USA TODAY article, the fraternity was never contacted, and it has since indicated that there was no social event that day, nor did anyone in the fraternity work at the aquatic center, as the alleged victim stated.
Reporters like Erdely and their editors should be ashamed of the damage they do for the sake of ratings and readership. As a journalism school graduate, I know that basic fact checking is a necessity to every article.
Here’s the too little, too late apology from Rolling Stone:
“Given all of these [conflicting] reports, however, we have come to the conclusion that we were mistaken in honoring Jackie’s request to not contact the alleged assaulters to get their account … We should have not made this agreement with Jackie and we should have worked harder to convince her that the truth would have been better served by getting the other side of the story. These mistakes are on Rolling Stone, not on Jackie. We apologize to anyone who was affected by the story and we will continue to investigate the events of that evening.”