The review of Rolling Stone's retracted story suggests possibly systemic issues at the magazine.
Cross posted from Pruning Shears.
The Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism's report on "A Rape on Campus" covers a lot of ground, but the part that jumped out at me the most dealt with confirmation bias. As Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig put it, "Sabrina Rubin Erdely, the investigative journalist and true-crime writer who penned the essay, set out with an answer in search of a question, a conclusion about systematic indifference to rape which she needed the right story to backfill." That desire seemed to short-circuit both the writing and the editing process.
Since the report only focused on the one story, it's probably tempting to read it as a tale of a singular, albeit massive, failure. Rolling Stone certainly seems to want to treat it that way. According to Managing Editor Will Dana, "It's not like I think we need to overhaul our process, and I don't think we need to necessarily institute a lot of new ways of doing things." He offers a false choice between doing nothing at all and razing the whole thing to the ground - but there is some territory between those two extremes. For just two examples, they could re-examine the work of those who failed most spectacularly, and they could look at weaknesses in their fact checking process.
As the author, Erdely bears primary responsibility for the failures of the piece. Since RS will continue to employ her, perhaps some scrutiny of her earlier stories is in order. Last December Mollie Hemingway flagged one that, as she accurately describes it, reads like a bad Lifetime movie. Since it wasn't an RS piece the magazine might not be able to fact check it as easily, but given the magnitude of the errors here it might be worthwhile to take a closer look. Has Erdley relied heavily on single source reporting in the past, or sacrificed accuracy for sensationalism in any other articles? If nothing else it might spare the publication further bad publicity.
That said, the dramatic calls on the right for her ouster are a bit much. As commenter VikingLS put it (emphasis added):
How does this work, exactly? How does Rolling Stone gain its credibility back when its response to this disaster is basically, "Hey, mistakes were made"?
The same way that The Weekly Standard didn't suffer from its part in advocating for the Iraq War. They give their readers the stories they want to believe. Whether those stories turn out to be true is beside the point.
(It's striking that just days before the RS retraction, Judy Miller was writing in the Wall Street Journal - deceptively, of course - about how her prewar Iraq reporting was totally fine. Yet Miller fails up to Fox News and the WSJ for the far more consequential act of helping to grease the skids for a war of aggression. You can prosper with specious journalism as long as you do so in a politically appropriate manner.)
Sean Woods, the principal editor on the story, said "Sabrina's a writer I've worked with for so long, have so much faith in, that I really trusted her judgment in finding Jackie credible...I asked her a lot about that, and she always said she found her completely credible." I understand the importance of having a decent work environment, part of which entails good feelings among employees. But isn't it possible to respect reporters' work, to think highly of their quality after having observed it over years, even to have warm feelings toward them - can't all that exist without relying on faith and trust for quality control?
To the extent that Woods and Dana were reluctant to take what Erdley could have perceived as an adversarial approach, their editing may have suffered. Perhaps their previous work could use a little more scrutiny as well, then. It wouldn't have to be some kind of public mortification of the flesh, just an in-house study of how that reluctance might have crept into other stories. It would be a little surprising if this were the absolutely very first time such a thing had happened.
Like confirmation bias, this is an issue at every publication - not just those that have a reputation for leaning one way or the other. How do you make a newsroom work when you need to reconcile two seemingly contradictory needs - the need for the team to have at least ostensibly friendly feelings towards each other and the need for a rigorous editing process that can sometimes be contentious? RS could use this as an opportunity to lead the way on new approaches.
The same is true for fact checking. Consider these quotes from the report:
- Magazine fact-checking departments typically employ younger reporters or college graduates.
- In this case, the fact-checker assigned to "A Rape on Campus" had been checking stories as a freelancer for about three years, and had been on staff for one and a half years.
- [From the fact checker of the piece:] I pushed...They came to the conclusion that they were comfortable
- The checking department should have been more assertive about questioning editorial decisions that the story's checker justifiably doubted.
Which led to this: "several journalists with decades of collective experience failed to surface and debate problems about their reporting or to heed the questions they did receive from a fact-checking colleague." Fact checking is an unglamorous job usually delegated to younger, less experienced employees. Yet they are the ones in charge of assertively questioning the work of more established journalists? With that kind of power differential how much latitude do they have?
Verbiage about colleagues notwithstanding, these people are not peers. Fact checkers are much farther down the food chain than superstar reporters and long-serving editors. While they might not have any trouble correcting simple and trivial factual errors (X graduated with a BS and not a BA), anything that questions a narrative - especially one, like here, that has confirmation bias - is much more likely to be brushed aside.
It isn't hard to imagine a recently-hired freelancer pushing back and hearing, who are you to question our decades of blah blah blah? There certainly isn't much incentive to do so from a job security perspective, either. In that situation I'd have done exactly what the fact-checker did: raise the issue, then let it go if the powers that be didn't think they needed to pursue it. And I don't know what the answer to that is, either. I don't know how you elevate fact checkers' position or make them better able to pursue troublesome issues without being labeled a malcontent or having someone pull rank.
The point, though, is that these are questions that could be profitably discussed. If Dana and the rest of the editorial staff at RS thinks there is no reason to even consider them - if doing so is called a complete overhaul and therefore not subject to debate - then what will emerge from this is the status quo. Probably a more vigilant status quo in Rolling Stone's case since they won't be eager to repeat this experience any time soon, but still one that will leave underlying flaws in place.
It's good that the magazine was willing to have a thorough and independent report of its failures. That shouldn't put the whole episode to rest, though. The magazine's leaders need to not just take their lumps but answer some hard questions. It might be the only chance they have to salvage some kind of silver lining out of the whole mess.