The opening paragraphs of the piece are set at the Mansfield, Tex., jail where Brown was awaiting trial. It narrates how Brown “shuffles” into the visitors room “wearing a jumpsuit of blazing orange.” The story continues:

Brown sits down across from his co-counsel, a young civil-liberties lawyer named Ahmed Ghappour, and raises a triumphant fist holding several sheets of notebook paper. “Penned it out,” he says. “After 10 months, I’m finally getting the hang of these archaic tools.” He hands the article, titled “The Cyber-Intelligence Complex and Its Useful Idiots,” to his lawyer with instructions to send it to his editor at The Guardian.

Another part reads, “Given the serious nature of his predicament, Brown, 32, seems shockingly relaxed. ‘I’m not worried or panicked,’ he says. ‘It’s not even clear to me that I’ve committed a crime.’ ”

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Yet Zaitchik was not in the room, as a federal court filing noted: “[T]he Rolling Stone author was not present and has never talked on the telephone to Brown from jail,” reads the document. So how could Zaitchik have assembled the scene? As he explains in an e-mail to the Erik Wemple Blog, he spent a long day at the jail with Brown’s lawyer, Ghappour. “There was some last-minute paperwork problem with getting into the room with them, so I constructed the meeting from Ahmed’s carefully documented account and did so in something very close to real-time,” writes Zaitchik. “No detail was fabricated, and I was present at the jail, just feet away.”

Reporter sets up a jail interview with a controversial figure and can’t get face time: That’s bad luck. To save the situation, Zaitchik essentially deputized Brown’s lawyer to pose some questions. “Ahmed took in a list of my questions, and copied down the conversation verbatim, as well as all details, eventually signed off by Brown himself,” notes Zaitchik. “I did not falsely depict myself as there (shaking his hand etc), only the facts — the sun was setting, he was wearing an orange jumpsuit, held up the article, said XYZ, etc.”

There’s no disclosure in the piece specifying that Ghappour had served as an interview go-between. Accordingly, Rolling Stone readers had to conclude that Zaitchik was having a direct conversation with Brown; he wasn’t. Therefore, Rolling Stone misled its readers in this case. Asked if a disclosure would have helped, Zaitchik, who dutifully responded to all inquiries about the piece, wrote, “I think the important thing is that they were accurate quotes, but sure.”

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They were accurate quotes filtered through Ghappour, the lawyer of the interview subject — meaning that if Brown had stumbled in the interview, said something stupid or made some inconvenient disclosure, there was a good chance that Ghappour would have edited it out. That’s barely an interview.

“To my knowledge,” writes Ghappour in an e-mail, “no journalist or media outlet has conducted an in-person interview with Mr Brown.” (Kevin Gallagher, who runs FreeBarrettBrown.org, tells the Erik Wemple Blog that only recently has Brown participated in such an interview.) At the time of the Rolling Stone story, notes Ghappour, he was screening Brown’s media interviews to comply with a protective order limiting the release of certain information in the case.

Tom Rosenstiel, the executive director of the American Press Institute, believes the arrangement violates one of journalism’s tenets. “I don’t see that the author explicitly says he was in the room (as far as I can tell) but leaves the impression he was, and even more importantly, he does make you believe he heard these words,” writes Rosenstiel via e-mail. “If he didn’t, that is a form of deceiving your readers, and it violates what we expect in the first covenant between a journalist and an audience: tell the truth.” It’s not that Rosenstiel is saying the words weren’t spoken. “We think he is an eyewitness,” says Rosenstiel. “And apparently he wasn’t.”

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There’s no contention here that this corner-cutting approaches the malpractice of Rolling Stone’s collapsed story, “A Rape on Campus,” about an alleged gang rape of Jackie, a freshman student at the University of Virginia. Yet there is one parallel micro-aspect: “A Rape on Campus,” by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, offended transparency by leaving out details about how the magazine reported the story (or didn’t) — there was no mention, for example, of how it apparently agreed to honor the alleged victim’s wishes “to not contact the alleged assaulters to get their account,” as a note of apology states. Further disclosure here, too, would have helped.

And another thing: Erdely’s account quoted friends of Jackie’s through Jackie’s recollections — and not through interviews with those friends — not unlike the indirect path of Brown’s quotes. Example:

Their other two friends, however, weren’t convinced. “Is that such a good idea?” [Jackie] recalls Cindy asking. “Her reputation will be shot for the next four years.” Andy seconded the opinion, adding that since he and Randall both planned to rush fraternities, they ought to think this through. The three friends launched into a heated discussion about the social price of reporting Jackie’s rape, while Jackie stood beside them, mute in her bloody dress, wishing only to go back to her dorm room and fall into a deep, forgetful sleep. Detached, Jackie listened as Cindy prevailed over the group: “She’s gonna be the girl who cried ‘rape,’ and we’ll never be allowed into any frat party again.”