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The popular magazine Rolling Stone, in a daring and striking article, “A Rape On Campus,” set their ambitions high to create an impact with an emphatic story while spreading awareness of sexual assault at a college. However, with such great ambitions and an attractive story, Rolling Stone didn’t watch their steps carefully and ended up running into a pole along the way.

Rolling Stone’s writer, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, spoke to the alleged rape victim, Jackie, and while the interviews were extensive and painted a very vivid picture of Jackie being gang raped by seven men at the University of Virginia, the facts were not checked.

The Washington Post poked numerous holes in Erdely’s story.

“Publications can be excused for getting things wrong; that happens all the time. What’s inexcusable, however, is that in this case, Rolling Stone did nothing to stave off catastrophic error,” said Erik Wemple of The Washington Post. “As The Post reports, the friends were ‘never contacted or interviewed by the pop culture magazine’s reporters or editors,’ meaning that neither Erdely nor the magazine’s fact-checkers lifted a finger to check with the story’s most obvious source of corroboration.”

Many key details like the number of men Jackie was allegedly raped by were off when The Post asked other sources. Not to mention, the name of her date that led her to be raped did not match anybody at the University of Virginia.

If this article was not about such an impactful, delicate topic and if this was not Rolling Stone, then this would be such a huge train wreck. Mistakes do indeed happen, as The Post acknowledges, and everybody is human.

However, this does not excuse Rolling Stone whatsoever. They are Rolling Stone, a popular and credible magazine, that should understand the implications and future impact an article about rape possesses.

Since the Washington Post has published various articles about Rolling Stone’s titanic blunder, the magazine has indeed written a lengthy retraction apologizing and acknowledging their mistakes.

“Yet the explanation that Rolling Stone failed because it deferred to a victim cannot adequately account for what went wrong,” wrote Rolling Stone managing editor Will Dana. “Erdely’s reporting records and interviews with participants make clear that the magazine did not pursue important reporting paths even when Jackie had made no request that they refrain. The editors made judgments about attribution, fact-checking and verification that greatly increased their risks of error but had little or nothing to do with protecting Jackie’s position.”

Rolling Stone originally pinned too much of the blame on being sensitive to Jackie, and that was a poor excuse due to the fact that the article was based strictly on her.

While Rolling Stone was right to tiptoe a bit around Jackie as they must be understanding from one human to another, that does not mean that they should base an entire article without checking any other sources.

It seems that Rolling Stone was in a hurry to publish a striking story, and they pulled the trigger too quickly. For a publication like Rolling Stone to miss all these untapped resources seems unfathomable.

At times writers can indeed get too caught into a story and commit grievous errors, but is it not the job of editors and those that check the facts to rein them in?
This colossal failure lies at the feet of not only the writer and the editor but all of Rolling Stone.

The investigative reporting of Rolling Stone will likely be more conservative in the near future. Rolling Stone has been known as a rather credible, but now, one has to wonder if they checked their sources.

As this article is about such a sensitive topic like rape, extra care should have been invested into it for the good of the magazine. After all, an impactful topic like rape affects more than just the magazine.

“The central thesis of the Rolling Stone story is that the university failed to respond to even the most terrible accusation of rape. Rubin Erdely has a potentially important insight into how universities handle sexual assault,” wrote Hanna Rosin of Slate. “She illustrates how deference to the sensitivities of rape victims also serves the university’s needs.”

The article has negatively affected the image of not only Rolling Stone, but the University of Virginia, the fraternities of the school, especially Phi Kappa Psi, where the alleged rape occurred, and of course victims of sexual assault.

To many that only hear about this story in passing, it leaves an impression that young girls pose as rape victims for 15 minutes of fame.
Jackie’s story is definitely missing some details, but that does not mean she did not experience a traumatic event. However, due to Rolling Stone’s poor reporting, another traumatic event occurred.

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