Some writers, such as this Vox.com reporter and this education writer, are calling for the Washington Post to stop pursuing the truth in the Rolling Stone debacle. That’s one extreme. Another extreme is to pretend that Erdely and Rolling Stone are total outliers. They’re not. They were doing what untold numbers of other journalists and media outlets do every day. And they just didn’t cover their tracks quite as well as others do. Unlike The New Yorker’s Packer, we should think about whether we’re making Erdely and Rolling Stone scapegoats for widespread journalistic worship of narrative and advocacy over truth.
Not just journalism, but education. There are entire university departments such as Womyn’s Studies committed to advocacy, not scholarship. And many professors are quite brazen about it. They flat-out admit that the primary aims of these departments are political.
Most journalism is private sector. The consumer can choose to buy Rolling Stone magazine or not. But why are taxpayers paying for Departments of Grievance?
The articles linked to are really quite hair-raising when you follow some of the other stories of hoaxes perpetrated by “stars” of the “News” industry.
The “monkey fishing” story is astounding, that is, I’m truly astounded that anyone would have believed it in the first place!
There was a similar story about hunters perpetrated on naive msm back in the 80’s that I personally shot down at a couple of different Papers, and have been waiting for it to reappear on the internet.
So far it hasn’t, probably because of the same reason the RS/UVA rape story has fallen apart so quickly.
Why does the Press seem to have immunity from fraud? They frequently feature photos that are shopped,and print articles that have no basis in truth. Their alleged purpose is to provide factual information on real events,not make them up, so how is it not considered fraud? Any lawyers out there that can answer that?
Performing poorly within your chosen profession is a sign of incompetence – of negligence – and it leaves one labeled as such. Seems to me that the conventional-wisdom view of the Rolling Stone people and the author goes that far, but not much further.
But that’s not what they’ve done. If they were incompetent, we’d be seeing story-based debacles that flitted from one side of the political continuum to the other, in approximately equal proportions.
Instead, these “errors” always seem to support their clear political philosophies.
So I think it is very important not to allow them the comfort of being called stupid or careless or simply “bad reporters.” That’s not what’s happening.
We need to remember, and emphasize, that this all stems from their complete willingness to lie to their readers’ faces – about very central themes of their stories – in order to convince their readers to vote as they want them to vote.
This isn’t carelessness. This is venality. They have become so used to flat-out lying to their readers that they no longer worry about putting in the effort to lie believably.
Rolling Stone didn’t get snookered. They got caught.
The gun control “debate” is dead and the Land Mine Issue has pretty much fizzled, so a lot of these academics have had to find greener pastures. This rape prevention business is just a bunch of tenured time servers trying to get something going that will bolster their departments and bring in The Money.
The media of course are floundering, trying to get back their audience but unwilling to give up their Liberalism. They’d sooner go broke than go Fox News. So they fall back on the old journalistic standard of Making Sh1t Up.
Perfect storm of desperate no-talent hacks bolstering each others baseless demagoguery in the faint hope someone will listen. And pay!
Rolling Stone(d) got lost a long time ago.
Not just magazines. Fake Rape is well represented in recent ‘feminist’ books as well. This Femnazi’s false rape accusation blew up in her face.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Hollywood/2014/12/10/barry-one-tolena-dunham-why-didnt-you-clear-my-name
I want to thank Lena Dunham for confirming that the “Barry” described in her book is a pseudonym. As the sole source of the events in that book, her confirmation was crucial. I am relieved to have my name cleared as best as it can at this point.
The last nine weeks, spent both wrongfully accused and ignored, were frightening for me and my family. It was also baffling. As days turned to weeks, and weeks into months, Random House and Ms. Dunham’s silence became unfathomable. It’s frustrating and ironic to me that Ms. Dunham’s recent admission that it was all an “unfortunate and surreal coincidence” echoes my earlier comment to a reporter printed over six weeks ago.
It also begs the questions, why didn’t you clear my name? Why did you wait? Why did I have to set up a legal fund and threaten to sue in order for action to be taken?
Surely, had my concerns not been ignored when I quietly and privately brought them to your representatives in October, your story would have remained focused on its true intentions, which I believe are very noble. Unfortunately, because of the delay, my reputation has sustained irreparable harm.
I hope this case serves as a reminder to writers, publishers, and others with a stake in narrative that they must take special care when releasing non-fiction works featuring criminal acts. Copyright page disclaimers simply aren’t enough. Fact checking must be rigorous, unintended consequences of altered details must be researched, and the use of pseudonyms must be consistent and clear. Importantly, this goes beyond a simple coincidence of a relatively rare name, as has been suggested. I was an outspoken Republican at Oberlin College; I already stuck out like a sore thumb. When such obvious parallels are missed, corrective and restorative action should be taken immediately.
I want to be very clear: I have absolutely no reason to doubt Ms. Dunham’s claim that she was sexually assaulted in college. I hope, too, that her story brings courage and strength to other survivors of sexual assaults. I also hope that my story will serve as an example to those who are falsely accused or incorrectly placed under suspicion of serious sexual misconduct allegations that the truth will eventually come out.
The truth to a liberal is like sunlight to a vampire they” crumble to dust when exposed to it
Too bad Barry One thinks that way – believing Dunham was raped. I think she is a lying sack of shit. It didn’t happen. She made it up and it shows in how she tried to pin it on this guy thinking he wouldn’t be able to fight it and that people would believe her story with no question. She is a liar. If I were this guy I would continue to pursue a libel and slander claim and reap the millions it would in a court of law. She is a liar.
Mollie wrote what I have thought for a couple of decades. The media by and large are nothing but liars and ideological shills.
The New Yorker guy sez:
“There’s no ongoing wave of plagiarism, fabrication, and inaccuracy………Such journalistic sins remain the exceptions.
Does this New Yorker guy live in a real actual world and can’t tell the difference between what’s written in the papers and what reality is? You think?
It is, in fact, more common than not, among “journalists” to fabricate, make up, overlook, omit, pay no attention to, ignore and other such as the Central Information Control instructs.
As is very instructive in the Ferguson, Mi. case.
While a tragedy for those involved, the circumstances and the character of the victim are completely ignored and replaced by ignorance of what actually happened in real life.
It is of course sad that the young man died.
Of course that cupid stunt lies. Barry was being a gentleman by giving her the benefit of the doubt after she viciously slagged him in her book “Not That Kind of Girl”. Now the whole world knows ‘what kind of girl’ she is: a lying, conniving selfish waste of skin who will slag anyone to further her career.
Journalism died the day the editor published the narrative in preference to the facts.
They killed their own businesses, good riddance .
CBC is a classic example without taxpayer money they would be long gone.These bloated parasites believe their narrative is more important to canadians than accuracy and basic reporting of human activities and world events.
Canadians now overwhelmingly get their information from other sources.
Another progressive win?
So, normal journalists in most mainstream media are just as corrupt, unethical, and full of hubris as that of the gaming press? Colour me unsurprised. #Gamergate
More leftist agent provocateur racism.
http://fusion.net/story/33826/black-figures-hanged-in-effigy-on-uc-berkeley-campus/
and race baiting
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ruled-a-suicide-black-teens-hanging-death-in-north-carolina-raises-specter-of-lynching/2014/12/13/89321c0e-831a-11e4-9f38-95a187e4c1f7_story.html
The death knell of the legacy news media was sounded with the birth of the internet. Once people could readily fact check, communicate with citizen journalists, and answer back in on-line comments or in blogs such as this one, the legacy media no longer enjoyed the strangle-hold on the narrative they were used to. “Rathergate” was their Stalingrad — an abject defeat so blindingly obvious that no one but the self-deluded could any longer pretend or believe that the legacy media was infallible or above question. They’ve been in retreat ever since. Ideologues will certainly cherry pick the narratives they choose to believe, but they can no longer do so uncontested. What previously would have passed uncontested like Erdely’s rubbish now quickly unravels, and even other news media such as the WaPo realize that their only chance of survival lies in staying ahead of the backlash. It’s the July plot of a crumbling, rotten, profoundly corrupt institution.
Women are Cosby’d all the time on college campuses, what’s really sickening is that this femnazi is capitalizing on it.