Rolling Stone UVA Article: 'A Rape on Campus' Called a 'Journalistic Failure', Officially Retracted
ByRolling Stone magazine has released an in-depth review of its "A Rape on Campus" investigative article and issued a full retraction for it.
A Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism team led by Steve Coll, the school's dean, published their report on the magazine's highly controversial article. They determined the article was a "journalistic failure" on the parts of its writer, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, and the editorial team that approved its publication.
Rolling Stone published "A Rape on Campus" in Nov. 2014, an investigative article meant to shed light on elite U.S. schools' alleged mishandling of sexual assault and rape cases on campus. Erdely detailed a gang rape that occurred at the University of Virginia's (UVA) Phi Kappa Psi fraternity party in Sept. 2012 to a female student only identified as "Jackie."
READ MORE: 5 main points from Coll's Columbia review.
Coll and his team concluded Erdely did not fabricate anything for her article, but rather did not do enough to challenge, or even verify, what her primary source told her. These shortcomings were not Erdely's alone; her principal editor, Sean Woods, and the magazine's managing editor, Will Dana, also took responsibility.
Below are excerpts of statements released by a number of people involved.
Erdely, via the New York Times: "Over my 20 years of working as an investigative journalist - including at Rolling Stone, a magazine I grew up loving and am honored to work for - I have often dealt with sensitive topics and sources. In writing each of these stories I must weigh my compassion against my journalistic duty to find the truth. However, in the case of Jackie and her account of her traumatic rape, I did not go far enough to verify her story. I allowed my concern for Jackie's well-being, my fear of re-traumatizing her, and my confidence in her credibility to take the place of more questioning and more facts. These are mistakes I will not make again."
Teresa Sullivan, UVA President: "Rolling Stone's story, 'A Rape on Campus,' did nothing to combat sexual violence, and it damaged serious efforts to address the issue. Irresponsible journalism unjustly damaged the reputations of many innocent individuals and the University of Virginia. Rolling Stone falsely accused some University of Virginia students of heinous, criminal acts, and falsely depicted others as indifferent to the suffering of their classmate. The story portrayed University staff members as manipulative and callous toward victims of sexual assault. Such false depictions reinforce the reluctance sexual assault victims already feel about reporting their experience, lest they be doubted or ignored."
Coll's review: "The collapse of 'A Rape on Campus' does not involve the kinds of fabrication by reporters that have occurred in some other infamous cases of journalistic meltdown. In 2003, the New York Times reporter Jayson Blair resigned after editors concluded that he had invented stories from whole cloth. In February, NBC News suspended anchor Brian Williams after he admitted that he told tall tales about his wartime reporting in Iraq. There is no evidence in Erdely's materials or from interviews with her subjects that she invented facts; the problem was that she relied on what Jackie told her without vetting its accuracy."
