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Rolling Stone rape story retraction fails: Erdely backpeddles on UVA apology

It's common knowledge that Rolling Stone dropped the ball with its story "A Rape on Campus" reported Bloomberg on April 6. Author Sabrina Rubin Erdely apologized profusely for publishing the erroneous piece. But even Rolling Stone's retraction fails basic Journalism 101.

The original story was a would-be expose on a gang rape of a woman called "Jackie" by Phi Kappa Psi fraternity members at the University of Virginia. It was proved false, but that's not the problem. Even properly vetted stories are sometimes found inaccurate. At the time of writing, they were accurate as far as the information went.

The rape story was a tissue lies fed to the author by a fabulist (professional teller of lies). This is also not uncommon. People lie. The problem was lack of vetting. Erdely didn't fact check. She failed to source comments, authenticate sources and validate testimonies. She repeated hearsay, reported lies as truth and published Jackie's version mostly verbatim.

A Columbia Journalism Review found that Erdely's UVA rape article failed simple litmus tests of accuracy. Editors failed to fact-check and published it unverified. Basically every step that could be missed was. Erdely's says she's learned from these painful mistakes and is sorry.

But it's curious how Rolling Stone's retraction itself fails. Erdely's apologies reads like backpeddling. Editors claims to have erred on the side of caution, saying concern for Jackie caused them to compromise details. But Columbia's report found that many missed facts could have been verified while still protecting the victim.

http://www.examiner.com/article/rolling-stone-rape-story-retraction-fa
ils-erdely-backpeddles-on-uva-apology

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