To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.
--- George Orwell
Saturday, January 24, 2015
As Per Yemen’s Houthi Rebels, Where Would We All Be Without The BBC?
Houthis rebels on the move in Yemen |
Completely in the dark, at least on the
role that this group of rebels is playing in Yemen’s current political chaos.
This week saw the ouster of Yemen’s President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi after
Houthi rebels swept down from the mountainous north of the country late last
year and gained control of the capital city of Sanaa. The instability has
created a worrying power vacuum in Yemen, where the US maintains a significant
drone program and American special forces are training Yemeni counter-terrorism
units. Most authorities regard the Houthis themselves as a relatively
insignificant force in terms of the wider War on Terror, though there are some
indications the Houthis have Iranian backing and their anti Israel, anti Semitic rhetoric, however
stock, isn't heartening to hear. But many fear that the turmoil could
lead to gains for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).
At any rate, Friday morning’s BBC Newshour carried an
interview between presenter Owen Bennett Jones and Middle East expert Simon Henderson
of the Washington Institute (also known as the Washington Institute for Near
East Policy.)
Among other things, the segment examined Yemen’s
complicated political and tribal dynamics, which are made even more tangled by
crosscutting religious sectarianism.
At one point (37 minutes, 20
seconds into the hour) Bennett-Jones asked Henderson what percentage of the
population are Houthis. It was a small fraction, Henderson answered
in clipped King’s English, adding somewhat wryly:
Houthais are Zaidis who are almost Shias... but not
all Zaidis are Houthis.
Still groggy, just sipping my first cup,
Henderson's almost self-parodying precision made me chuckle. Well then,
right…. Glad we got that one cleared up… I had been so confused.
Sectarian differences in that part of the world can
get pretty fine-grained. But you could almost hear some of the more
exasperated---and bloodyminded---soldiers in the War on Terror screaming:
"Bomb 'em all and let God sort 'em out!" Americans in particular
don't have a taste for the nuance and complexity that an accurate assessment of
a situation like Yemen demands. Recall Bush 43 had to have someone explain the
difference between Shia and Sunni.
Thursday, January 22, 2015
On Rolling Stone UVA ‘Rape’ Hoax, Did Time Magazine Get Suckered Too?
It’s hard to imagine how the Rolling
Stone UVA rape debacle could involve any more journalistic malfeasance
than what’s been demonstrated by the reporter who wrote the story, the editors
who shepherded it and the fact checkers who vetted it.
Yet Saturday’s Washington Post suggests
that Time magazine also may have been remiss in some of the attention it
paid to Rolling Stone's dubious "campus rape" story,
specifically to the angry backlash the Rolling Stone story has fueled.
The Post's T. Rees Shapiro, who who has led the Post’s
on-the-ground reporting effort in Charlottesville that has revealed so much
about the case that Rolling Stone writer Sabrina Rubin Erdely
had not, conducted an interview with author and rape activist Liz Seccuro.
Seccuro had been a key source for the Rolling Stone piece and had gone
to to bat for it in Time after skeptics began to attack
it in early December. According to the interview, Seccuro not yet
read the Rolling Stone piece when she defended it. The revelation
suggests, without saying so directly, that Time got bamboozled too.
Seccuro, who was gang raped in 1984 at the same UVA frat as the undergraduate in the Rolling Stone piece and served as one of Erdely's main informants, told Shapiro that she has since developed doubts about the Rolling Stone piece. Her turnabout was prompted by "evidence appearing in news reports” which highlighted “inconsistencies in the magazine’s account,” as Shapiro put it. The reversal made Seccuro “the latest among a growing group of sexual assault survivors, U-Va. students and fraternity members to raise concerns about the Rolling Stone account." According to Seccuro:
I think it’s important, for a gang-rape survivor at
U-Va. who was portrayed in this story, to say what was a red flag to me. I
became frustrated in that I felt like the work of so many other people in the
article went down the toilet.
The Post explains that Seccuro gave lengthy interviews to Rubin Erdely about her 1984 assault and the woeful response to that assault at the time on the part of UVA deans, establishing a culture of institutional indifference on UVA’s part that stretched back thirty years. As Seccuro told it, she also served as one of Rubin Erdely’s shadow advisors, helping to hook up the writer with other experts on college sexual assault. Describing an almost sisterly bond, Seccuro said she was on the phone with the author on the eve of the story’s publication. Seccuro was excited, sure that the piece “was going to rock the world and shake it to its core.”
Shapiro notes that in the face of early challenges to
the article by bloggers like Richard Blow and columnists like the LAT’s Jonah
Goldberg, Seccuro did some serious damage control on Rubin Erdley’s behalf. In a Time Magazine essay that she published on December 4th,
Seccuro wrote that
Like
many Americans, I read the gruesome account of a gang rape at the University of
Virginia’s Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house, as told by reporter Sabrina Rubin
Erdely in a recent issue of Rolling Stone.
Unlike most people who read the article, I was not shocked by it.
The
similarities between my experience and Jackie’s story are astounding because
the culture has remained almost identical in the three decades separating our
rapes.
Seccuro urged readers not to doubt
a rape survivor’s story just because the details sounded "horrific." False
reporting of rape was very rare, she wrote, adding:
Those who make false
accusations are despicable, and should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of
the law. But we cannot choose to disbelieve an account simply because it’s too
awful to fathom. I am living proof — verified by the Virginia courts — that the
horror is all too real.
Seccuro also told Shapiro that she
now thinks Jackie might have cribbed details of her alleged Phi Psi gang rape
from the 2011 memoir Seccuro published about her ordeal, Crash Into Me. The Post said that Seccuro “was struck by how her own story
was ‘similar in so many, many ways,’ to Jackie’s account in Rolling Stone.” While
she said she didn’t know whether Jackie’s story was influenced by her book, the
“horrifying thought” had been suggested to her. Seeming to want to have it both ways, Seccuro declared:
I
don’t want the attention to be on me. But there’s only been one documented gang
rape at Phi Kappa Psi, and it’s mine, so do the math.”
Seccuro’s suggestion that Jackie
plagiarized the details of her attack from Seccuro’s memoir echoes charges made by some caustic bloggers who noted similarities between details and imagery used in Rolling Stone's depiction of the gang rape scene and "Gone Girl," Ben Affleck's recent Hollywood movie. But the real bombshell in the Post interview was
the revelation that as
excited as Seccuro was about the piece’s impending publication---and as ardent
as she was in its defense afterwards---when the story actually went live, Seccuro said she
couldn’t find the will to read it.
“I decided I was not strong enough
to read the entire article” she confessed to Shapiro, adding that she “had no
reason to read it because I knew what was going to be in there.”
Seccuro told Shapiro however that when she did finally sit down to read the magazine in early December, she immediately spotted red flags in the
narrative and “decided to take it apart with a fresh eye.” As the Post put it:
Armed
with a highlighter and pen, Seccuro began to circle, underline and annotate in
the margins.
She
highlighted the detail that the room where Jackie alleged she was attacked was
pitch-black. She underlined a section that described how Jackie crashed through
a low glass table, causing shards to cut into her back as the men raped her. In
another section, Seccuro wrote in the margins: “Not possible.”
Seccuro’s change of opinion on the
Rolling Stone piece and her explanation for that change very definitely suggests
that she hadn’t yet actually read the piece when she used a
platform given to her by Time magazine to bash early critics of the Rolling
Stone piece. Many of those critics sensed, as Seccuro eventually would, that almost all the forensics involved in the
description of Jackie’s assault were “not possible.”
Shots In The Dark blogger Richard
Bradley, who has been aces on the Rolling Stone story from the get-go, has a slightly more
ambiguous take on the question of whether Seccuro read the piece or not before
publishing in Time. But like me, he senses disingenuousness on Seccuro's part, as well as blatant opportunism, explaining that
If I had to
guess—and I do—when things were going well for the (Rolling Stone) article, she was trying to piggyback on the positive
publicity it was getting, particularly among women. Now that the article has
been thoroughly discredited, she wants to get back on the right side of
history.
Neither the Post nor Richard
Bradley make it explicit, but it is hard not
to conclude from Seccuro's about-face, as well as her explanation for it, that when Time Magazine
gave her the green light they were giving it to someone who wasn’t telling
them the truth and in turn told a lie to their readers. Essentially, she spoke with authority
about something she had not really read and impugned the integrity of skeptical journalists
who had in fact read it quite closely.
I was curious: Did the editors at
Time have the same takeaway I had from the confession Seccuro made in the Post?
If so, how had Time magazine gone about letting someone write about a piece she hadn’t really read. Who brought
Seccuro in, who edited her piece, and who fact checked it? And now that Seccuro has admitted she hadn’t actually read the Rolling Stone piece she so ardently defended, was Time
going to run a correction, or append an editor’s note to the text online? If
so, it might be kinda tough to get the wording right. I mean, what do you say: “The
author told us she read the piece that she stood up for here but in fact she later admitted she had not really read it. We regret the fact that her defense it was basically bogus”?
Repeated calls and emails to Ryan Sager, the Time.com deputy editor I was told handles guest contributions like Seccuro’s, were unreturned. So were outreach efforts to Liz Seccuro herself and to the many representatives
listed on her contact page: a literary agent, a film agent, a freelance magazine agent, a speaker's bureau agent.
I did get an auto reply from Seccuro’s literary agent that among other things explained that if I wanted to book “Liz” as a speaker for my institution or firm, I should get in touch with her speaker’s bureau guy. The email also noted that “Liz is not empowered to give legal or financial advice regarding individual cases.” Like the Time magazine piece she authored, this caveat seems to need a bit of amending too. To the list of things Liz Seccuro might not be “empowered” to give, add "journalistic criticism" as well as "second guessing."
I did get an auto reply from Seccuro’s literary agent that among other things explained that if I wanted to book “Liz” as a speaker for my institution or firm, I should get in touch with her speaker’s bureau guy. The email also noted that “Liz is not empowered to give legal or financial advice regarding individual cases.” Like the Time magazine piece she authored, this caveat seems to need a bit of amending too. To the list of things Liz Seccuro might not be “empowered” to give, add "journalistic criticism" as well as "second guessing."
Thursday, January 8, 2015
Being There: How Rolling Stone's UVA 'Rape Culture' Fiasco Makes The Case For Shoe Leather Reporting
As Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s Rolling Stone campus rape story began its collapse in early December, critics and commentators sought to place blame for what could go down as one of American magazine journalism’s greatest train wrecks.
Citing the “leading questions” that a UVA rape “survivor’ had described being asked by the Rolling Stone reporter, Washington Post media blogger Erik Wemple said that Erdely had pursued her story with an “agenda.” Her bias was also communicated through a “proclivity to stereotype,” in this case, about what Rubin Erdely labelled “elitist fraternity culture.”
Likewise the blame assigned to “confirmation bias,” by former TNR
science editor Judith Shulevtiz who described it in CJR,
referencing the philosopher Karl Popper, who originated the term.
“Confirmation bias,” Shulevitz explained, was the result of “our innate
urge to see only evidence that confirms beliefs we hold to be self-evident, and
dismiss facts that challenge those convictions.” Noting an early December Slate
podcast interview conducted by Hannah Rosin that became critical to the story’s
unraveling, Shulevitz continued:
Erdely told Rosin she’d gone all around the country looking for rape
survivors and was delighted when she stumbled on Jackie. She was obviously
traumatized, and her story illustrated everything Erdely knew to be
true—that frat boys rape girls and universities are indifferent to rape
survivors.
(She) based her story solely on Jackie’s version because she found her
“credible.” Erdely’s editors found her “credible” too, so much so that they let
Erdely waive the usual journalistic protocols, such as getting more than one
source on a story about a horrible crime. And readers found Jackie credible
because everyone knows that there’s an epidemic of rape on campuses around the
country and women hardly ever level false rape charges, because why would they
put themselves through that?
As someone who has written quite extensively about media bias (two books, out of three) I’m quite open to
these arguments, having documented the way that an overdetermined deference to the pieties
of organized feminism has encouraged miscoverage of what turn out to be bogus allegations
of sexual assault. Some of the examples I wrote about have a lot in common with the Rolling
Stone campus rape disaster, such as the Duke lacrosse team rape case of 2006 as
well as “The Women’s War," a 2007 Times Magazine report on
sexual assault in the post 9-11 military. In that latter case, one of the alleged victims, a
Navy seabee, claimed to have been raped while serving in Iraq when in fact she
never even deployed there.
Still, as much as media bias is part of what brought the Rolling Stone piece low, the fundamental trouble with Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s reporting actually starts a bit closer to the ground. In fact, it stems to a large degree from the minimal amount of time she spent in Charlottesville itself conducting good-old fashioned, beat-the-bricks, knock-on-doors, face-to-face, shoe leather reporting. Legwork we used to call it.
Still, as much as media bias is part of what brought the Rolling Stone piece low, the fundamental trouble with Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s reporting actually starts a bit closer to the ground. In fact, it stems to a large degree from the minimal amount of time she spent in Charlottesville itself conducting good-old fashioned, beat-the-bricks, knock-on-doors, face-to-face, shoe leather reporting. Legwork we used to call it.
Although it took months for her to establish UVA as her focus, Rubin
Erdley spent exactly one weekend there---maybe as few as two nights in
total---to put together a major investigative piece immersing us in UVA’s “culture
of rape,” meeting her centerpiece source, Jackie, for the first and for the
only time on that single weekend visit. Instead, Rubin Erdely relied on
internet searches, telephone interviews, Skype, text, instant messaging, chat
rooms, social media and other forms of “remote,” even “virtual” reporting with
which we are all now so digitally smitten, especially those attracted to “Big
Data” reporting, as Rubin Erdley admitted at a Temple University media studies
event.
No doubt these tools are essential for a magazine reporter, especially
in a time of meager travel budgets. You certainly want to use them to maximum
advantage, improving journalistic reach, access and penetration. But on
overreliance on these reporting tools can open the door more readily to
“confirmation bias” in a way that they wouldn’t if they had been balanced by
face-to-face interaction. They also can make a reporter vulnerable to
exaggeration and manipulation on the part of sources, and might encourage
on-the ground efforts to become perfunctory or decorative.
Stories like this one---a complicated story where the human factor is so
important, where trust and credibility between reporter and source plays such a
critical role and is best established face-to-face, and where “place” has the
power to shape a journalistic understanding of cultural context and to reveal
human truths that you just can’t get electronically, cry out for "being
there.” It's just too easy to get snowed, lied to or spun at a distance--- too
easy for the "story line" to take over from the facts and for
someone’s BS detector, even a “finely tuned” BS detector, as Rubin Erdely
claims to have, to malfunction.
If Rubin Erdely was hamstrung by an overbearing deadline or a tight
travel allowance, then Rolling Stone needs to think about being more generous,
at least if it wants to stay in the business of serious investigative
reporting. Stories like this need a real presence on the ground to get right.
*****
The timeline Rubin Erdely describes in the Rolling Stone piece
itself, cross referenced with her Twitter feed (inactive
since November 30 when controversy broke out) as well as the emails
UVA released through Freedom of Information requests and some interviewing I
did show that she flew from Philadelphia to Charlottesville on Thursday
September 11. Among other things
she met with some of her student sources at a popular Charlottesville coffee
shop, went to a monthly meeting of the Board of Visitors that Friday, took a
tour of frat row with a group of sexual assault “survivors,” later that Friday
night. She also met in person with Jackie and another UVA rape survivor at a
restaurant on the Corner, just outside off the university grounds, although
it’s unclear whether that restaurant meeting was before or after the frat row
tour.
According to Emily Renda,
a young UVA administrator and rape "survivor" who introduced Rubin
Erdely to Jackie and served as a fixer of sorts for the overall article, Renda
met Erdely at a parking facility after she landed in Charlottesville and gave
her directions to the coffee house. Renda told me Rubin Erdely stayed no longer
than Sunday, and perhaps even left as early as Saturday. Renda also said that
Rubin Erdely had not yet met her primary source for the piece, Jackie, until
that point.
In the emails UVA released, Rubin Erdely seems to have planned
another reporting trip but had to cancel it, informing the UVA PR rep on Monday
September 15 that she would be “unable to return to campus this week” and would
therefore have to conduct an interview with UVA president Theresa Sullivan by
phone. The last scene in the piece references events occurring in “the third
week of September,” in such a way as to suggest that Rubin Erdely was there for
them herself. But at least one of those events---a report of the disappearance
of the UVA student Hannah Graham
who was later found slain---did not occur in that time frame but on the
Saturday of the writer’s weekend visit (September 11th-13th or September
14th). This suggests that she either wanted to create the impression of being
in Charlottesville longer than she actually was or that her magazine made a fact-checking
error. Given the overall slipshod way it checked the story’s other
supposed “facts,” the latter is more likely.
What this means is that for a major 9000 word investigative piece about
UVA’s “culture of rape,” Rubin Erdely spent no more than 72 hours on the
ground, maybe even as little as 48, during which she met her main source for
the very first time, at least in the usual, pre-digital sense of “meeting”
someone. Not exactly cultural immersion, whether it’s a “culture of rape” or
any other subcultural phenomenon.
It actually seems to be a magazine writers’ version of the old New York
Times “toe-touch,” which was banned in the wake of Jayson Blair’s abuse of it.
In the “toe touch,” a harried national correspondent would do all his or her reporting
from a newsroom or a bureau desk then fly off to wherever he or she needed
to be to be able to slap a “dateline” on the story. This gave the impression of
“being there” in the place where news was happening when in reality the
correspondent had spent only as much time on the ground that it took to get a
return flight home, often never even leaving the airport. Rubin
Erdley’s remote reporting methods stand in contrast to the legwork conducted by
the team that Washington Post sent into the field. Among other acts of basic,
elementary journalism, the Post, led by reporter Taylor Shapiro (T. Rees)
actually
interviewed the three student “friends of Jackie’s” who allegedly
saw her right after Jackie’s 2012 rape but who Rubin Erdley never actually
located or spoke with.
*****
In an interview she did with the Washington Post,
Rubin Erdely has said she first “met” Jackie over the phone. Jackie, she
said
Was absolutely bursting to [her] story. I could not believe how it
poured out of her in one long narrative. She spoke so fast, I hardly had a
chance to ask her a question. She was dying to share it.
Rubin Erdely says she then spent a long time putting Jackie’s story
through the ringer, presumably by phone and by email, with Jackie and with
other knowledgeable sources. According to Rubin Erdley, the story checked out.
Since she only met Jackie for the first time on her one and only visit to
Charlottesville, it’s safe to deduce that shortly after speaking with Jackie on
the phone that first time, she did not hop a plane or drive to follow up in the
flesh, as a more careful reporter might.
Judging the veracity of rape victim testimony is more than scrutinizing
the facts of "the story;” it’s body language, narrative progression,
pacing, consistency, and a host of other subtle, subliminal cues that combine
into what we call instinct or intuition. This is one reason why sex-crimes
detectives don’t take reports from rape victims over the phone, beyond basic
courtesy and sensitivity. As neuroscience has it, the face transmits far
more data than the human voice; you are more certain to make a dependable
decision on someone’s credibility if you can see and hear them instead
of just the latter.
As many commentators and critics have noted, the forensic details of
Jackie’s three-hour ordeal during which she said seven men raped her over the
course of three hours, simply don’t pass “the straight face test,” in the words of one UVA law professor. If anything the torrential way in which Jackie first
told the story would have made me suspicious, suggesting a certain
exhibitionism (would you tell a stranger about your rape over the phone?) and
of being overly practiced.
If Rubin Erdely had actually had the chance to sit down with Jackie face
to face to go over these details before she committed to using Jackie's
story as her centerpiece, she might been more skeptical and found another case
to lead her piece. She also might have been less reliant on Jackie in the
backend of the piece as a central witness against UVA’s “institutional
indifference.” So much of this supposed fecklessness is seen through Jackie’s
point of view and rendered in her voice that once Jackie loses personal
credibility on her own story, she loses credibility on the other stuff too,
despite Rubin Erdley’s insistence that questions about Jackie’s story shouldn’t
“sidetrack” the article’s “overarching point.” In fact the real point is that
if Rubin Erdely had had a “sit down” with the girl at the front end of her
reporting before her trust in her had solidified and before it became
too complicated to find another touchstone, Rubin Erdley and Rolling Stone
might have been spared a lot of pain.
Another thing to think about is that had Rubin Erdley spent more time on
the ground engaged with the physicality of her story, she might have actually
walked into the Phi Kappa Psi
house itself and looked the frat’s composite photo, usually hanging in foyer or
entry hallway of most fraternity houses in order to see whether the names
Jackie provided her of her attackers matched up with names of members of the
frat at the time Jackie said she was assaulted there. (These composites usually
go back for several years, so finding a 2012 composite in the fall of 2014
isn't so difficult to imagine and could have given her the information that she
could not find from the frat’s “outdated” contact sheet.”) It’s hard to say
whether the composite photo would have had photographs of “Armpit” and
“Blanket”---alleged frat members mentioned by nickname in the gang rape sequence--- but
you never know. These frats don’t have security desks; if Rubin Erdely was
uncomfortable identifying herself as a reporter, she could have walked in and
pretended to be someone’s mother or hired a local male stringer. There are
ways. And what better way for a writer to involve his or her reader than a
description of journeying into the very belly of the beast?
Beyond helping to verify names of the Jackie's attackers, presumably
within the bounds of the agreement that Rubin Erdely had made with Jackie not
to rile them against her, time actually inside Phi Psi might have given her a
more informed and less pejorative sense of fraternity culture. As described in
the Slate podcast
Rubin Erdely did, her understanding of frat dynamics is quite distant,
cloistered really, making it easy for her to imagine a conspiracy of knowing
silence among the brothers. Said Rubin Erdely in her Slate podcast:
I would speculate that life inside a frat house is a
probably, you know, you have this kind of communal life where everybody is sort
of sharing information…People are living lives closely with one another and it
seems impossible to imagine that people didn't know about this.
More time on the ground, especially on a weekday, might have allowed
Rubin Erdely to check the registrar’s office for proof that Jackie dropped out
of an anthropology class she said she had shared with the attacker who
experienced impotence and had to resort to a coke bottle. (My experience tells
me you can get lucky with a clerk in person trying to get this information, but
rarely so on the phone.) Also the time to actually attend a weekly
meeting of UVA’s sexual assault survivor’s group, One Less,
instead of reconstructing what those meeting are like courtesy of descriptions
she received secondhand and doing so in such a way as to encourage the false
notion that She Was There. (Carefully re-read this section; while it’s
skillfully written to affect the impression she was there, in fact you can
discern she was not.) Being at one of those meetings, which Erdely
characterized as UVA’s “true secret society,” would have certainly been good
for the “color and quotes” magazine writers live for as a way to establish
immediacy. But it also could have opened Rubin Erdely's ears to the possibility
that some of the victims in the UVA rape survivor network might be
embellishing their stories, in the unavoidable way that groups of
undergraduates engage in story-topping no matter what experiences they are
sharing, and that these stories represented a recursive information loop that
could have thrown Rubin Erdely’s efforts to confirm Jackie’ story off course.
(Renda told me the group meets every Monday; would it have been that hard
for Rubin Erdely to extend her stay beyond the weekend?)
Additional ground time might have allowed her to get a better sense of “Stacy,”
who the reporter seems to have been connected to courtesy of that “survivor”
network. According to Rubin Erdley, Stacy had brought a complaint to the
university sexual misconduct board in the spring of 2014 against a
male student who was allowed to remain on campus despite a guilty verdict and
“pattern evidence” from two other women who said he had attacked them too. In
Stacy’s account, the alleged assailant's wealthy family had threatened to sue
her as well as individual UVA deans if they went forward with the complaint.
I found Rubin Erdely’s description of Stacy’s case suspect for a couple
of reasons. The description of the assault Stacy said she experienced did not
involve anywhere near the kind of vicious rape Jackie had endured but instead
involved drunken groping, albeit with “digital penetration,” in a semiconscious
haze of “too much whiskey,” which the Charlottesville DA’s office declined to
prosecute. More significantly, the writer references a nine-hour formal
hearing into Stacy’s charges, but the hearing is rendered in a secondhand way,
probably through Stacy, without specificity. Rubin Erdley also cites Stacy’s
claims that the family of the accused interfered with the proceeding against
him and threatened legal action against the accuser and the school’s deans
without anybody else aside from Stacy confirming that this family harassment
actually happened in the way Stacy said it did.
Any nine-hour formal hearing is going to generate a hearing transcript,
a copy of which the complainant and her representative would most likely have
received. Would more time on the ground have offered Rubin Erdely the chance to
obtain it? Passing such a document to a reporter is often fraught for a victim
given the legal and administrative restrictions governing these procedures; at
UVA it might actually represent an Honor Code
violation. But if she actually met "Stacy" in person and spent enough
time to gain her trust, Rubin Erdely might have gotten at least a peek at it.
This would have at the very least put her and Rolling Stone’s fact checkers in
a more informed position to absorb a very unambiguous email warning from UVA’s
press rep that they had their facts wrong on Stacy's case, which they apparently
simply dismissed.
More time in situ might also have helped the reporter find
material to corobborate Stacy's allegation of the accused family’s
interference---letters, email, phone logs. As it stands in the piece, we only
have Stacy alluding to the family interference and lawsuit threats with no
other attribution or documentation to back her up. How did Rubin Erdely confirm
what Stacy had alleged?
To be sure, Rubin Erdley sees herself as someone who has high regard the
value of first person reporting and for experience. Her website explains
that
For the sake of her articles Erdely has trekked thorough Tibet, watched
an autopsy, joined a religious cult, visited maximum security prisons and once
tried out to be a Philadelphia Eagles cheerleader.
But the UVA regent who accused Rubin Erdely of an act of “drive by
journalism” was actually being more literal than he might have imagined. Even
the scenes she actually did experience first hand, the frat row tour for
example, as well as the scene where she is having a meal with Jackie at a
restaurant on The Corner, have a generic, guidebook feel to them. Until I
started putting questions to people in the position to know whether she was
actually there that night, I had suspicions she might have cribbed some of the
on-scene details from YouTube videos, and had "been there" herself
via Skype or FaceTime on a tablet or a smartphone but not in person. Maybe
these scenes are rendered so superficially because she was just tired, packing
too much in for what was, in effect, a pit stop. Parachute journalism--- the
whole “get in, get what you came for and get out” involved in it---isn’t easy.
*****
We’re all waiting now for the Columbia Journalism School to issue its
report on the UVA rape fiasco, the J School having been given that assignment
when Rolling Stone owner Jann Wenner gave up on his own “internal review” for
reasons still undisclosed. According to a release from the office of
J- School dean Steve Coll, Rolling Stone had asked Columbia to “conduct an
independent review of the reporting and editorial decision making that led to
the publication of its recent story on sexual violence at the University of
Virginia.” Coll later told the New York Times
that he had been promised unfettered access to Rolling Stone’s staff and materials. “We are focusing on the editorial process but have the
freedom to move in any direction along the way that we believe would be germane
and of public interest,” Coll said.
This gives the impression that Rolling Stone will be opening its
editorial books so to speak, and that Columbia will have access to all
reportorial materials associated with the story. This presumably means all
internal editorial communications, such as emails and memos between the writer
and her editors and fact-checkers, as well as traffic between those editors and
fact- checkers themselves bearing on what the writer was up to and whether or
not they had a sense something might be wrong.
It’ll be interesting to find out how much Rolling Stone has
actually shared with Columbia, whether it is doing so in the spirit of legal
“discovery” or whether it set protective limits, a likelihood given the
defamation and libel suits that will surely follow. It also will be interesting
to learn what Columbia learns of the decision-making involved in the
construction of the story itself, which we’re told we will be able to read in
articles Steve Coll and his teams will publish in Rolling Stone itself and on
the magazine’s website. Even more intriguing, given the importance face-to-face
interrogatories play in this kind of reporting, is the question of whether
Rubin Erdely is a cooperating witness and whether Coll will be have direct
access to her. Such face-to-face access will help move the inquiry beyond the
paper and digital trail, which will make it easier to tell whether her
journalistic malfeasance stemmed from simple negligence or active
wrongdoing---i.e lying to her editors, misleading fact-checkers or somesuch.
Now that's a deposition I'd pay money to watch.
For now though I think it’s safe to say that if Columbia does get access
to the tapes and transcripts of the interviews that Rubin Erdley conducted in
the process of her reporting, most of those interviews will have been conducted
on the phone or by email and not face-to-face. Let’s hope Columbia notices the
crucial difference between these two different modes of assessing credibility
and determining truth, as well as the role that this difference might have
played in this particular journalistic debacle. If the rest of the journalism
world takes it as a cautionary tale for the Internet age, so much the better.
Tech-savvy reporters, especially those in the iPhone generation,
have come to take some new reporting tools for granted. We've forgotten that
while they may extend our reach, it's what they actually grasp that is what's
most important. They may make reporting easier, more convenient and less
costly, but an overreliance on them at the expense of actually "being
there" can make for an awful, and awfully expensive mess. Sometimes you
have to reinvent the wheel.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)