On Rolling Stone, lessons from fact-checking, and the limits of Journalism

[ismnotwasm]

It was as both a feminist and former fact-checker that I watched with rage on Friday as Rolling Stone distanced themselves from the account of a gang rape at UVA they published last month, covering for their own journalistic missteps by throwing Jackie, the rape survivor at the center of the piece, under the bus. And the rage is only growing as many of the journalists now rushing to condemn Rolling Stone are starting to spin a tale of how a “Believe the Victims” mentality got in the way of good journalism in this case. Feminism’s to blame, as always.

This weekend, I wrote 3,000 words about this debacle from my perspective as a feminist and fact-checker. About everything Rolling Stone did wrong and everything that’s wrong with the conversation we’re having about it now. In the end, I looked at them, all these fucking words about journalistic standards and the purpose of fact-checking and blah blah blah, and realized that to say what I had to say about what is wrong here I would need thousands more because here I was writing about journalism, while Jackie was getting doxxed and on some college campus — or off some college campus — somewhere in this country another girl was being raped.

So instead of saying the million things, I’ll try to say just one. Or a couple.

In their statement, Rolling Stone admits to just one mistake: agreeing to honor Jackie’s request that they not contact the accused men because she feared retaliation. They write, “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.” That’s not actually a full accounting of their failure here. In reality, Rolling Stone not only didn’t contact the men, as Jackie requested, but also seems to have not done anything else to verify the most basic factual details of Jackie’s account and also wasn’t transparent about what they had and hadn’t been able to independently verify. In doing so, they failed to uncover the discrepancies in Jackie’s account before it was published — discrepancies, mind you, that are the kind of discrepancies you’d expect to find when fact-checking a first-person account of a traumatic rape survivor and that in no way offer damning evidence that her whole account is not true. In doing so, they left Jackie without the primary benefit — the tremendous gift — that the fact-checking process gives to journalists and their sources: the assurance that if the story is challenged — and Rolling Stone had to have anticipated it would be because rape survivors are always, always doubted — an institution has your back. It was as much a feminist failure as it was a journalistic one that they didn’t do their due diligence to ensure they were ready to stand by Jackie when the inevitable happened.

But what I really want to talk about is the explanation that is emerging in the media world for this royal fuckup. Rolling Stone themselves offered up an appealing scapegoat: Jackie. Especially in their original statement, which has now been edited, Rolling Stone shamefully tried to lay their journalistic failures on their source, saying they had “trusted” Jackie’s account and found their “trust in her was misplaced.” (They’ve now edited the statement to acknowledge that their mistakes were their own, not Jackie’s.) I’d argue they also implicitly scapegoat feminism — with its “sensitivity” to survivor’s needs and tendency to “believe survivors” as the default. After all, as anyone who has worked in journalism knows, your “trust” in a source doesn’t actually have anything at all do with how you go about fact-checking a piece. The first rule of fact-checking is never “trust” anything — not your reporters, not the spelling of your own name, not whether the sky is blue. No, the problem was that Rolling Stone decided to “make a judgement” to ditch their normal — and, by all accounts, normally very rigorous — fact-checking process because they were “trying to be sensitive to the unfair shame and humiliation many women feel after a sexual assault.”

http://feministing.com/2014/12/08/on-rolling-stone-lessons-from-fact-checking-and-the-limits-of-journalism/