An exhaustive report by the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, released on Sunday, deals a devastating blow to Rolling Stone’s decision-making in bringing its story “A Rape on Campus” to millions of readers. Photograph by J. Lawler Duggan / The Washington Post via Getty

On Sunday, the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism released an exhaustive report on the Rolling Stone story from last November depicting a brutal gang rape at the University of Virginia. Some of what’s contained in it was already known, both from follow-up reporting in other publications, especially the Washington Post, immediately after the original article appeared, and from the Charlottesville, Virginia, police department’s investigation, which was made public last month. First and most important, the account of the supposed victim—referred to only as “Jackie” by the Rolling Stone reporter, Sabrina Rubin Erdely—is not at all supported by independent facts. Erdely never located the supposed ringleader of the gang rape—“Drew” in the story, a lifeguard and Phi Kappa Psi fraternity brother—and his existence cannot be established. Erdely never approached the three friends whom Jackie quoted as sounding coldly unsympathetic after she told them about the rape, and all three deny saying the things attributed to them. Records show that Phi Kappa Psi held no social event of the kind Jackie described on the night she said she was raped there. The debacle—for Rolling Stone’s reporter and editors; for the University of Virginia and Phi Kappa Psi; for rape victims whose willingness to come forward could be checked by this sensationally popular story’s false claims; and for Jackie, whose motives and true experience remain unknown—was already pretty clear by early December, two weeks after the article’s publication, when Will Dana, the magazine’s managing editor, posted a note to readers announcing that “there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie's account, and we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced.” (The next day, in the face of criticism, Dana revised that language, and added, “These mistakes are on Rolling Stone, not on Jackie.”) By then, Erdely’s active Twitter account had gone dark.

What Rolling Stone did not say outright last December was how profoundly it had misplaced its trust in itself. With a nearly thirteen-thousand-word investigation by Columbia’s Sheila Coronel, Steve Coll (who is a staff writer at this magazine), and Derek Kravitz, that is now a moot point. The report deals a devastating blow to the magazine’s decision-making, from start to finish, in bringing “A Rape on Campus” to millions of readers. In doing so, the report displays the kind of thorough reporting and careful analysis that was lacking at Rolling Stone. (Commissioned, admirably, by Rolling Stone as an independent review with almost no prior constraints, it went up on the magazine’s Web site in its entirety on Sunday night, and a condensed version will be published in the print edition.)

In a footnote, the authors call their report “a work of journalism about a failure of journalism.” Their investigation, like the original article, takes the form of a roughly chronological narrative. It begins with the exploratory phone call Erdely made last July to Emily Renda, a U.V.A. expert on sexual assault, looking for a campus rape case to write about. Long-form narrative nonfiction might be in dire straits financially, but it’s become the default prose genre of our time, and not just in magazine articles and books. Official publications like the findings of the 9/11 Commission and the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on torture now borrow its techniques: the use of characters, scenes, description, and dialogue; the creation of tension through pacing, foreshadowing, and recapitulation; the omniscient narrator whose sources are semi-hidden in order to preserve the elegance of storytelling. This tyranny of narrative is not unrelated to the disaster at Rolling Stone.

Any journalist who works in this form and is being honest will recognize the moments of truth that led to Erdely’s and Rolling Stone’s undoing. Like most journalists worth reading, she approached the story with a passionate purpose, a sense of injustice, of a wrong that needed to be righted. In Erdely’s case, she wanted to expose the “culture of rape” on college campuses, and she went looking for a case so vivid and gripping that no reader could dismiss it. When Renda told her about Jackie in that first conversation, Erdely found what she was looking for, and she made the decision not to pursue other, less dramatic cases that she learned about. Renda later told the Times that a more ambiguous incident might have seemed “not real enough to stand for rape culture. And that is part of the problem.” Her remark could be applied to narrative journalism as well: extreme, lurid cases are inherently tempting subjects, but they are not the most likely to lead to complex or profound or abidingly true work.

As soon as she heard Jackie’s astonishingly detailed account of the rape—seven men in a dark room, blood-chilling words, a shattered glass coffee table, a bottle used for penetration—Erdely became so invested in it that she never allowed herself to sustain any doubts. Her reasons were both personal and professional, well-intentioned and selfish. Skepticism would have meant more aggressively questioning Jackie, who appeared to be a traumatized victim of a violent attack: the report states that “the editors and Erdely have concluded that their main fault was to be too accommodating of Jackie because she described herself as the survivor of a terrible sexual assault.” But doubt also might have meant losing the whole story, with its riveting, horror-film lede, and the ammunition it contained for thunderous moral condemnation of rape culture at U.V.A.

Once Erdely had her story, she did everything possible not to let it go. She tried to learn the identity of the ringleader, telling Jackie, “I’m not going to use his name in the article, but I have to do my due diligence anyway.” Jackie froze up and offered no help, and then she stopped returning Erdely’s messages. Erdely’s editors—Will Dana, the managing editor, and Sean Woods, the story editor—had been asking her to find the ringleader, but with the article’s closing date coming up, and Jackie gone missing, they decided to abandon their due diligence. Instead, they assigned the ringleader the name Drew, without ever speaking with him. (Dana, according to the report, “said he was not even aware that Rolling Stone did not know the man’s full name and had not confirmed his existence.”)

That concession brought Jackie back on board, as the magazine intended. Why did Rolling Stone give in? It wasn’t just that Erdely and her editors had come to trust Jackie—they had less reason to trust her now than before. It was the utter necessity of keeping Jackie on the hook. With every week invested in the story, with all the time and resources it entailed, they were loath to give up what they thought they had and start again from scratch. If it had to be Jackie or Drew, they would stick with Jackie.

Erdely and the editors have suggested that Rolling Stone had its hands tied by a skittish and traumatized source. The Columbia report finds otherwise. The magazine failed to pursue even the paths that Jackie never told it to avoid. There are many examples, but perhaps the most crucial came when Erdely asked for Jackie’s help in tracking down Alex, Ryan, and Kathryn, the three friends whom Jackie spoke to the night of the supposed rape and who come across, in the story, as cruel. Jackie discouraged Erdely, claiming that Ryan had expressed horror to her at the prospect of speaking to the magazine. (This was false.) “Yet Jackie never requested—then or later—that Rolling Stone refrain from contacting Ryan, Kathryn or Alex independently,” the report goes on. “ ‘I wouldn’t say it was an obligation’ to Jackie, Erdely said later. She worried, instead, that if ‘I work round Jackie, am I going to drive her from the process?’ ” And so Rolling Stone, instead of giving the friends a chance to tell their story, simply accorded them pseudonyms, too—Andrew, Randall, and Cindy.