It’s Been a Bad Week for Journalism

~ Laura

The UVa story has been retracted. Links here and here.

Red Wedding at the New Republic. Links here and here.

UPDATE: I’m upset about the New Republic. I’m very upset. I need to read interesting things, and this is one more place that will start to give me 8th grade explainer shit. I don’t need any more 8th grade explainer shit.

The people who left are very smart people. Where are they going to go? There are fewer and fewer places that want long form articles about smart stuff.

I’m upset, dammit.

UPDATE2: More from Andrew Sullivan 

Published by Laura

32 thoughts on “It’s Been a Bad Week for Journalism”

  1. I think it’s a good day in journalism when there’s a good takedown of a bad article. I am upset about it though, because it does add to an already difficult climate for that kind of discussion. And I was sucked in, and my experience certainly is that there are true stories out there.

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  2. Just to add — I hear you on TNR. I admire those guys. I have sat in meetings with equal jargon and similar-though-different pressures and it’s kind of cool they all left. I hope they start something interesting.

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  3. I don’t care about journalism, and certainly not in music magazine. It’s the profoundly contemptible behavior of the government employees at U.Va. that offends me. Why do we have a state that believes in the presumption of guilt and collective punishment? It’s a disgrace to democratic government and rule of law, which are supposed to be the animating values of American republicanism.

    Even if marketing and public relations justify trampling on individual rights, I can’t believe that the U.Va. administration has helped its image.

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    1. The issue with UVA is much more complicated. The RS author’s point (well, one of them) was that a woman was sexually assaulted, and UVA did nothing about it when she eventually reported it.

      Now, you may step in here and claim, “Oh, but the woman lied*. The author of the article was unethical. We can’t believe any of this.” But look at what *did* happen in the aftermath of the article’s publication. If UVA had actually investigated the accusation of sexual assault properly, they would have had a response when the article was initially published, and that response would have been “We investigated this and found it to be untrue.”

      Instead, what happened is that UVA decided to shut down the fraternities. Why? Because they had no clue what happened because they didn’t take the accusation seriously enough to investigate it.

      *I’m not sure she did, for what it’s worth.

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      1. Wait–I thought in a previous discussion we had been all mostly agreeing that colleges should not be inserting themselves into rape cases, but should hand off to the police and let the police do their job.

        A college is not equipped to adequately investigate or adjudicate two-year old rape cases.

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      2. It’s all part of the same thing. The problem is that the initial investigation was not properly done. UVA could have a policy to hand off these kinds of criminal cases to the police.* Then UVA could say “The police investigated it and determined it was a false report.” They couldn’t say that, which is why they quickly suspended fraternities. It was purely CYA defense.

        *I am not hugely confident in the police either, and in this case I have a personal example. Many years ago, when I first started at my current job, I received a threat of violence via AIM that seemed to be from a student. At that time, I shared my AIM handle with students and suggested they IM me with questions if they saw me online. I got an IM that said the person would stab me if they got a bad grade on a paper again. I contacted the local police as I was home at the time. They looked into it and found via AOL that the IM had come from a campus computer. (Duh.) And after that, it all fell apart. Why? The police in my town did not want to deal with the campus safety and security office. The police officer basically told me so. At the time, I had a new job, two kids under the age of 5, an unemployed husband, and absolutely no time to deal with it, so I just … hoped for the best. Honestly, that was all I could do. My boss was mostly supportive but I could tell she thought I should never have given out my AIM handle.

        tl;dr: Our processes for determining the veracity of sexual assault accusations suck, and if we’re really freaking out about false accusations** then we need to develop a much better way of addressing the investigation process.

        **Again, I am not convinced that “Jackie” was lying.

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  4. I think there are two hard-to-hold-in-the-head-at-the-same-time things going on:

    1. It is genuinely the case that a lot of recent high profile rape cases have not held up. (Sorry, Dominique Strauss-Kahn!)

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_v._Strauss-Kahn

    Particularly in the case of accusations of gang rape, I think that we should expect lots of evidence (physical and photographic). In cases like Steubenville and Cleveland, TX, there was photographic evidence floating around, which is why the cases blew up. That may sound like a high bar to set (who is going to circulate such incriminating material?), but experience suggests that actual gang rapists are also people who don’t have the future orientation to realize that they can’t take and circulate souvenir photos of themselves committing felonies. And in general, the younger generation (or at least a significant minority of it), is almost incapable of doing anything without taking and sharing pictures. (Speaking of which, has any noticed an unusual quantity of smoke coming from the Cosby residence? The sort of smoke you’d expect from thousands of old Polaroids being disposed of?)

    While this may sound very unfair to accusers in gang rape cases, I don’t think that we should give accusers the benefit of the doubt if there is neither physical nor digital evidence.

    2. At the same time, I think that campus feminists are quite right to believe that women who are the victims of acquaintance rape are very reluctant to expose themselves to the legal system or the court of public opinion (but might eventually surface, if as in the case of Bill Cosby, there are enough accusers that there is some safety in numbers).

    So, to summarize: a lot of highly publicized rape cases seem to be bogus, while at the same time a lot of real rape cases never see the light of day.

    And a bonus third point:

    3. As people have been saying, the rate of reported rape is way down since the 1970s.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_statistics

    As I read the chart showing the rate of reported rape from 1973-2003, it seems to have plunged since a peak around 1980. Possible explanations that come to mind include: reductions in lead exposure, the 1980s law-and-order approach to crime, imprisonment of 1 in 200 Americans (which has got to keep a lot of rapists off the street), sex offender registries, the rise of DNA testing, the rise of public awareness of DNA testing (thanks to all those popular police shows), reliable paternity testing (which means that acquaintance rape is suddenly more hazardous to the perp), broader car ownership by women (so less accepting of rides from dubious people), and (most recently), almost universal cell phone ownership among young women, so any woman can be assumed to have a communications device that allows her to call for assistance if she is starting to feel unsafe, plus video games and pornography. (Cell phones, video games and porn don’t really fit the chart, but I feel like they have to contribute to overall conditions.) Apologies for overlapping categories.

    Also, looking forward, I think that the concept of “enthusiastic consent” is going to be a positive influence and it seems like a big intellectual advance over the “no means no” that we heard back in the 1990s.

    So, things aren’t perfect, but there are a lot of reason for optimism.

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    1. I also think that there may also genuinely have been some impact from the women’s movement itself with regard to culture. The 1970s were pretty terrible in a variety of different ways. To begin with, there’s a whole canon of 1970s sex-with-underage-girl songs (Adam Carolla has an amazing radio montage of these) that just wouldn’t be tolerated today. Likewise, the 1970s was a very rape-y time in American cinema. When you’re watching a 1970s movie, you never know when a totally gratuitous non-consensual sex scene is about to pop up.

      http://www.danielrichnak.com/blog/2009/12/28/three-days-of-the-condor.html

      http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068699/synopsis?ref_=ttpl_sa_2

      (The first one is Three Days of the Condor with Robert Redford and the second one is High Plains Drifter with Clint Eastwood.)

      And it’s not the bad guys–these are the heroes (or anti-heroes–that was big in the 1970s).

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    2. I see your position but I am not as convinced about your reasoning. I bet there’s been some reduction in rapes, but I also suspect that hook up culture and a culture where a girl might have a drunk selfie with a guy before he rapes her contributes to less reporting, not more. Look at how Jian Ghomeshi’s tried to use women’s texts against them. I

      Certainly I was raped in a pre-cell phone era but one of the things I have thought about over the years is how the guys put condoms on. (Ah, the privileges of having a group.) They were not raging out of control and the only reason they bruised me as badly as they did was because I did fight. It was at the peak of AIDS education. But I have to say that out of my experience, it would have been trivial if I’d had a cell phone for the guys to get it away from me. The idea that I had some danger point at which I’d’ve called someone is totally not how things went down.

      I was at a party, I was not drinking because I didn’t drink at the time. A few of us got talking about music, & the one guy invited me back to his dorm room. I was flattered because they were pretty cool dudes, and I was decidedly uncool. My spidey sense did not kick in until they locked the door, which probably was at least partly my upbringing, but it was also not on because there wasn’t anything all that sexual in the approach.

      It’s a _really nice_ idea that women are going to have this intuition that they should pull out their cell phones and call someone or that the guys are going to always take pictures but I don’t see it. I sometimes don’t even know how to have this conversation with people who have not been through it. Your instincts even once they turn on are not to protect your virtue or emotional health. They are to survive, and freezing up is a big part of that. Not just in the moment. The only thing I wanted was to have had that not happen, so that’s how I behaved.

      I do wonder a bit at the women who go to the media, but I don’t know who approached Janet and how. I think it is possible that of cases that hit the media, there’s a higher percentage of women who are at the least highly confused about boundaries and experience and truth.

      I also think the problem in this story, since I am writing an epic comment, wasn’t with fact checking. It was with the structure of the piece and how it was sourced. These details should have been confirmed at the editing stage, not the fact-checking stage, which is typically a junior role.

      Anyways, long comment.

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      1. “I think it is possible that of cases that hit the media, there’s a higher percentage of women who are at the least highly confused about boundaries and experience and truth.”

        I think that’s more than a possibility, and it’s an uncomfortable problem.

        I know someone really well who was the victim of an acquaintance rape in college, and she didn’t do anything with the police at the time, but if she became aware of another rape accusation against that particular individual, she would feel duty bound to come forward now, despite the obvious unpleasantness involved in doing so.

        On a totally different subject, here’s a question–why the heck does the US have something like 19X as many reported rapes as Canada? That’s bizarre. Are Canadians ridiculously underreporting, 19X as polite as Americans, or what?

        (It’s the first chart here, on the right. There are some head-scratchers on the chart. Swedes are 66X as rapey as Serbians? Not hardly.)

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_statistics

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      3. My very strong feeling is that rape statistics are actually statistics of how comfortable women are reporting a sexual crime to the police, and how willing women are to see violations of their bodily autonomy as rape. The recent example of a Norwegian woman reporting a rape in Dubai, only to be charged with and imprisoned(!) for fornication is a good example of social norms clashing. In plenty of places, if women even conceive of their experience as rape, they know reporting it to the police is useless at best and incredibly harmful at worst. There are still places where women are killed or disowned by their families for being raped.

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  5. Marc Andreessen (I think, might have been someone else) said last night on Twitter that the best thing to fix journalism is to fix its business model. At least with respect to the issues leading to the TNR situation I think that’s true. For a long time, really only ending about 10 years ago, print media was nice and profitable. It wasn’t really that long ago. If someone can find a new business model that works, maybe those days can come back.

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  6. I am also sad about the new republic. I am like you, looking for interesting things to hear and read. TNR was one of those places where i could find it. I am thoroughly sick of link bait sites and words like “innovation and disruption”.

    “A jogger saved this columnist’s life. Here’s how he repaid his rescuer.” Doesn’t that sound like a link bait headline? I didn’t read the article (in WaPost, because of that, that it sounded too much like “an amazing mold that will save your life.”). Contrast that with “Hostage Killed as US Rescue Attempt Fails” (tells me what I’m going to read about).

    I hope we find a model that keeps the interesting articles coming for me (my personal interest in journalism) and that, more globally, the press still serves as a means of exposing corruption and big stories (the NY Times article on rape kits, the LA Times articles on Bell & Vernon pension corruption, . . .). My resolution is to pay my subscriptions fees and not think that I should get all my articles for free.

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  7. re: fact-checking. This is going to continue to be a big problem. Many major magazines and newspapers don’t do it anymore. Certainly the online versions are not doing it.

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    1. And in the media world of blogs, facebook posts, you tube videos, tweets, not to mention Secret, Ask FM, anonymous blog comments, . . . is there any reasonable expectation of an obligation to fact check, and yet information posted there can have significant effects on people’s beliefs.

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  8. With the UVA case, I’m not seeing any evidence which shows that Jackie actually wasn’t raped. Clearly RS needed to do more research and corroborate the details. When the details didn’t all fit, they needed to figure out what happened before publishing the piece. What we’re getting now though, is people with every reason to deny the rape happened denying it happened, and those words taken as truth.* Details, such as the date and the name of the exact frat (which Jackie admits she didn’t know at the time), are not true. These aren’t details that subtract substantially from the story, although they do raise concern about the account as told. “Drew” wasn’t a member of Phi Kappa Psi. Is he a member of another frat? Did they have a party that night? What about the preceding or following weekend? Traumatic events are hard to process and remember. Rape victims have to deal with an incredibly hostile environment where they are antagonistically interrogated about events that are emotionally charged and where memory for any number of reasons may be very hazy and then penalized if the account doesn’t fit some unattainable model of how the narrative should go. Too upset and hysterical? Unreliable. Too calm? Lying. We expect women to act traumatized in a particular way, but to also have a precise and superhumanly accurate recollection of an event, ideally with obvious physical evidence they had the wherewithal to collect.

    My guess is Jackie was raped, possibly gang raped, at a frat. The name of the frat and the number of people present are likely things she didn’t know. As the retellings went on, she was fed or came up with facts, which are now incorporated into the narrative and also into her memory of the night. It was 7 men. It was Phi Kappa Psi. It was a glass table she fell through (rather than say, a broken bottle that got knocked off a table.) It was her friends who told her not to go to the hospital. In reality, these things oughtn’t to matter in our outrage of rape.** We don’t think it’s ok to be raped by 1 or 3 men but not 7, or that it’s ok to be raped as long as you didn’t break a glass table, and so on. Unfortunately, this is not a conversation we’re ever going have. I’m mad that RS published the story in the first place as is, but I’m also mad that they hastily published a retraction while we still have no clue what’s going on.

    *WP has already published a minor correction in their debunking of Jackie’s story.
    **Obviously it matters to get the small details right in journalism, but we shouldn’t be less outraged about Jackie’s story if it turns out she actually was raped but not as sensationally as was first reported.

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    1. 1. ““Drew” wasn’t a member of Phi Kappa Psi.”

      Then it’s very odd that he would be one of the ringleaders of a ritualistic gang rape at a fraternity he didn’t belong to as part of yearly pledge initiation. That doesn’t make sense.

      Also, as people have mentioned, a pledge initiation that happens in late September at a college where people pledge in the spring also makes no sense at all.

      At some point, Occam’s Razor suggests that the easiest explanation is that none of this happened in any way resembling the RS story, so that the RS story is totally worthless.

      2. “What about the preceding or following weekend? Traumatic events are hard to process and remember.”

      Fortunately, in the story, Jackie immediately called for the assistance of three friends. Those three friends should be the frontline of confirmation of this story and should be able to clear up dates. There may be texts and so forth still available that will clear up the chronology. Facebook is also very helpful for this sort of thing. It should be easy to figure out the Greek calendar for the month before and month after, even at this late date.

      3. “As the retellings went on, she was fed or came up with facts, which are now incorporated into the narrative and also into her memory of the night.”

      Possible.

      4. “In reality, these things oughtn’t to matter in our outrage of rape.** We don’t think it’s ok to be raped by 1 or 3 men but not 7, or that it’s ok to be raped as long as you didn’t break a glass table, and so on.”

      But all of those details were the heart and soul of the RS story. Take away those particular details, and the RS story is gone.

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      2. On reflection, it would have been a good idea to run the RS story past a present or former UVA Greek before publication to ask for fact-checking ideas.

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    2. It’s mostly clear it didn’t happen at Phi Kappa Psi, but there are 30+ other fraternities at UVA, one of whom “Drew” was a member of. If the story were about how Phi Kappa Psi was uniquely terrible, or the night of Sept 28 (if it didn’t happen then) was a uniquely bad night for rapes, then the story would completely collapse. The story is, however, that frats create a noxious rape culture and universities deal with rapes poorly. If the rape in question occurred at Frat B rather than Frat A, that subtracts from neither part of the story. If it turned out the rape never happened, that subtracts from the first point, but not the second, as the university would have no way of knowing the rape was false unless they seriously investigated the claims.

      As it is, the WP article clearly indicates Jackie’s friends all think she was raped, remember her experiencing a traumatic event, and notice a clear change in behavior dating to that date. Again, it’s important to get the details right, and it’s really terrible RS would run this story without fact checking things like the name of the fraternity, but we’re nowhere even near knowing what happened, and the facts still point to Jackie probably being gang raped at a frat (as corroborated by “Andy,” since forced fellatio is still rape).

      For what exactly happened, we’re again going on “he said/she said” with people with faulty memories trying to remember the exact wording of what they said 2 years ago. Why is “Andy’s” recollection automatically more accurate than Jackie’s? With most other crimes, we assume that there will be differing accounts by people with different motives involved, and that none of that takes away from the fact a crime happened. In rape cases, the minute there’s a discrepancy,* we assume the woman is making the whole thing up.

      The reason why this is problematic is that if you’re going to use it as an example in a national expose, you better make sure the story is beyond ironclad. It’s really negligent to go after billionaire organizations with bottomless pockets for lawyers with a story you haven’t done more than the most cursory fact checking on. It’s also given tons of fodder to MRA types who think women routinely lie about sexual violence for funsies. Again, I’m angry this story was published, but not because I think it was false.**

      *or not even, as the case may be: e.g., Jackie claims she was “bleeding from the vagina.” Is that an injury Andy is going to notice? On a woman wearing a red dress? At 3 am in the morning?
      **Though who knows. There are people who are sociopaths, so that’s still a possibility. I read a New Yorker article years ago about a man in Guatemala who set up his own kidnapping and execution to frame his political enemies, so stranger things have happened. Given Jackie’s marked change in behavior as documented by her roommate and her PTSD diagnosis, she would be a master manipulator and really playing the long con.

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      1. This is not a PC thing to say in this context, but there is such a thing as mental illness. Also, the assignment of mental health diagnoses is as yet not an exact science, so I’m not sure I’d put a lot of weight on her PTSD diagnosis or that if she does have PTSD, that that is necessarily the only applicable diagnosis.

        I have a young relative who was in a spectacularly abusive relationship with what turned out to be a violent felon (and that’s totally for real–the guy is a convicted murderer in a particularly nasty case) and sustained a lot of brain damage during those years, including PTSD. The horrifically abusive relationship was real, but at the same time my young relative also regularly asserts paranoid fantasies, for instance that the CIA is pursuing her. Talking to her these days is like entering into the Twilight Zone, because you never know what the relationship is between exterior reality and what she’s telling you. And you’d better believe my younger relative is very convincing (at least up until you know her pretty well). Jackie could be a lot like that. It’s certainly not unknown for college-age people to have mental breakdowns out of the blue–in fact, if a person is going to develop a mental illness, the late teens/early twenties are a common time.

        http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1925038/

        It may be that the UVA case says way more about the weaknesses of the US’s mental healthcare system than it does about rape culture.

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      2. I still can’t believe no one here is talking about the Serial podcast, which I thought was a national obsession*. But it raises these same issues about memory, testimony, reliability, confirmation bias, and crime. Except that it’s pretty damned certain in Serial that a crime happened, because Hae Min Lee’s dead body was found.

        I guess my point here is that all the questions about who, what, where, when, how in Jackie’s case are obviously all not clearly answered, but that lack of clarity leads some to conclude that a crime was not committed against her. Yet, we can see the same dynamic happen in a case where there is a dead body and a confirmed crime. And hell, a jury sent Adnan Syed to prison for life based on the testimony of a guy who changed his story at least four times. Why is that fine and it’s not fine for a traumatized woman and her friends to have uncertain and sometimes conflicting memories?

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      3. “And hell, a jury sent Adnan Syed to prison for life based on the testimony of a guy who changed his story at least four times. Why is that fine and it’s not fine for a traumatized woman and her friends to have uncertain and sometimes conflicting memories?”

        Well, maybe that’s not fine.

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  9. Well, after reading this , I simply have no idea what happened. The remarks of “Cindy” and “Andy” near the end are especially baffling. A news article isn’t supposed to result in total uncertainty, but that is about the current situation.

    Included in my uncertainty is what U.Va. did–other than, recently, collective punishment based on a presumption of guilt. Did “Jackie” report a rape to the university? What did the university do in response? Given the problems with the RS article, I can’t be sure of anything.

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    1. Sorry, the link didn’t appear. I was referring to Erik Wemple’s piece yesterday afternoon in the Washington Post.

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      1. I’ve always thought Coates had plenty of variables to work with (loved his series on learning French as a late language-learner, for example) – though race is a pretty big variable to work with, and if you can do it well you’ve accomplished a lot. This seemed like a pretty good critique of TNR to me.

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      2. I thought it was worthwhile information to know about TNR, and worth remembering that the loss of a great institution shouldn’t cause us to glamorize it to sainthood.

        And, one big price tag all black men pay in America is the exhaustion of *having* to weigh all things in terms of one variable. I’m guessing most black men raised in the US have very few interactions in which they can be unequivocally certain that the one variable of their race did not play a role.

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