Here’s my new article for PJ. It deals with the report by the Columbia Journalism School on the infamous and bogus UVA gang rape story written by Sabrina Erdely and published in Rolling Stone. Here’s an excerpt from my piece:

Erdeley and the editors appear to have jettisoned those time-honored procedures for reasons that were most likely both ideological and self-serving: the story was a perfect fit for their pre-existing biases about campus rape and its perpetrators, and the tale was so sensational that it could practically guarantee them a record number of readers.

In other words, it was far too good to fact check. The author and editors lost sight not only of the need to do so, but of how obvious the story’s deficiencies would be.

[ADDENDUM: Erdely’s and Rolling Stone’s problems shouldn’t end with the UVA story, either. I’ve confined my own posts to that particular article of Erdely’s, because opening up the wider topic of her other stories and my suspicions about them would make for too long a tome.

But anyone who’s done much research on Erdely has probably come up thinking that she may be a serial offender. As a warm-up for background on just how deep Erdely’s deceptions went on the UVA story, please see Richard Bradley, who has been excellent on the topic of Erdely and the UVA article from the very start. Pay special attention to point #10, but just read the whole thing.

Now go to Leon H. Wolf at RedState for a description of another time when Erdely may have used the very same m.o. in writing a story, and for the very same purpose. Wolf’s piece begins with this reflection:

One of the painful things the New Republic was forced to undertake whn [sic] it first came to light that reporter Stephen Glass had fabricated certain details of his stories was to go over all his stories with a fine toothed comb to determine exactly how systemic the problem had been with Glass’s reporting. After all, a reporter who faked details in one or two stories might well have done so in others. To TNR’s credit, they promptly performed an exhaustive, line-by-line review of each of Glass’s stories over the years and laid bare the gruesome results for the world to see, exposing that the infractions for which Glass was eventually caught were only the tip of the iceberg, and that fabulist reporting by Glass was the rule, not the exception.

But that was so Twentieth Century. This is the 21st, dude, so there’s no need:

Rolling Stone has shown absolutely no inclination to engage in a similar soul searching over whether Ms. Erdely might have engaged in similarly shoddy reporting in the past, and whether such shoddy reporting (if it exists) might have slipped through their fact checking and editorial system. Ms. Erdely by all appearances has not been professionally disciplined at all for her blunders and the Rolling Stone brass is acting as though this is an isolated incident in which they were blameless victims of an exceptionally clever con artist.

Wolf goes on to describe the similarities between the UVA article and a previous piece Erdely wrote that appeared in—you guessed it—Rolling Stone, called “The Rape of Petty Officer Blumer.” I had read that article of Erdely’s, as well as several other pieces questioning its veracity in the wake of the UVA article, back in December when the UVA story first broke and unraveled. The two Erdely stories were very similar in terms not only of the tale told, but of Erdely’s agenda and her journalistic techniques. There were hundreds of vulnerabilities in the Blumer case that Erdely never really confronted, and I had expected that a larger investigation would have been launched by now into Erdely’s entire journalistic output, because the Blumer tale is not the only other fishy part of it (see this, for example).

That hasn’t happened. Columbia has kept to its assignment, which was limited to the UVA story and its wretched excesses.

I had also expected Erdely to be fired by now, and to never be able to work as a journalist again. Once more, I was wrong. Someone has to expose this further, because it is getting more clear every day that both Erdely and Rolling Stone have almost certainly been doing this for some time, and that they probably won’t stop now. The Columbia report gives the impression it was an isolated incident, and that is unlikely to have been the case.

And I don’t think the practice is limited to Erdely and Rolling Stone. They just got caught because their offenses were so glaringly obvious, and the story so sensational that it got an enormous amount of attention. If they’d just been a bit more subtle they would have gotten away with it.]