Fourth Estate Rolling Stone and the Media’s Glass House Journalism lessons are so basic—and so easily forgotten.

Jack Shafer is POLITICO's senior media writer. Previously, Jack wrote a column about the press and politics for Reuters and before that worked at Slate as a columnist and as the site's deputy editor. He also edited two alternative weeklies, SF Weekly and Washington City Paper. His work has been published in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, the Columbia Journalism Review, Foreign Affairs, The New Republic, BookForum and the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal.

There is nothing like a journalistic plane crash to inspire newsroom loudmouths to jump on their desks and lecture colleagues about the collapse of standards and crow that they’re such exemplars of the craft that never in a trillion years could they or their publication be snookered by a fabulist, a hoaxer, a dissembler or a liar.

Thanks to the release of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism’s authorized and comprehensive report on Rolling Stone’s horribly flawed (and now officially retracted) exposé “ A Rape on Campus: A Brutal Assault and Struggle for Justice at UVA,” this sort of posturing is clogging the Web today. I, too, would be doing a condemnation-dance on my desk to celebrate Rolling Stone’s stupidity if I wasn’t so certain that the lessons the Rolling Stone debacle teaches us are fleeting. The time may soon come that the pontificators flop as miserably at the fundamentals of journalism as reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely and her Rolling Stone editors have.


May Satan capture your soul and make it his plaything if you think you and your publication are incapable of such journalistic malpractice. Editors and producers at the highest ranks of journalism have fallen again and again during the past few decades, committing crimes against journalism that match or surpass those of Rolling Stone and Erdely. Here’s just a partial list: Janet Cooke at the Washington Post; The Hitler Diaries (various publications); Stephen Glass at the New Republic, George, and, um, Rolling Stone; Jayson Blair at the New York Times; Jack Kelley at USA Today; NBC’s “exploding pickup truck”; CNN’s Tailwind story; CBS’ “Rathergate” coverage; Mike Daisey’s Apple story on This American Life; Jonah Lehrer (fabrication in his book); and CBS again (Lara Logan on Benghazi). And as long as we’re building out a listicle, let me mention that when I worked at Slate, I edited and published a sham story by a liar.

In no way, of course, should this list excuse the Rolling Stone story, any more than a list of bank robberies should exonerate the guy who knocked off a branch office of the Industrial State Bank yesterday. But the arrogance feeding the outrage against Rolling Stone and Erdely is not that different from the arrogance of reporters and editors who violate the basic rules of journalism—make things up, embrace confirmation bias, ignore exculpatory evidence, over-rely on single sources, over-rely on anonymous and pseudonymous sources, neglect to pursue potentially exculpatory leads—to get the story. As Steve Coll, one of the authors of the Columbia University report, told the Columbia Journalism Review, Rolling Stone has all the resources to report a superb story on college gang rape, it just didn’t bother to implement them. “It’s Reporting 101. It’s not a question of whether your news organization has several layers of editing or you have fact-checkers or you have all the time you need,” Coll added.

As thorough as the Columbia J-school study of the Rolling Stone piece is, there’s not a surplus of criticism in it that wouldn’t have occurred to any intelligent, close reader. Everybody at Rolling Stone, including the author, knew better than to do what they did. Within days of the publication of “A Rape on Campus,” Worth magazine editor Richard Bradley was unpeeling its most dubious layers on his personal blog with less effort than you’d use to skin a banana. “One must be most critical about stories that play into existing biases,” Bradley wrote. “And this story nourishes a lot of them.”

The official postmortems of rotten stories—as inevitable and necessary as they are—nourish another set of existing biases. (If you have a spare weekend, I invite you to read the 234-page independent report on Rathergate.) Typically, a few culpable parties are fired, retired or otherwise chased off in the wake of a postmortem, but such purges are mostly symbolic and only punctuate the interval between transgressions. Wherever work is done—in the laboratory, in the halls of justice, in restaurant kitchens, on the operating table, in newsrooms—some people will always violate the social contract or cut corners. The press can commission as many pages of forensic reports as they wish, but they’ll never reform the incorrigible and the lazy. (It goes without saying that the same goes for other waywarding professions.)

“The most important service rendered by the press and the magazines is that of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust,” wrote Samuel Butler. Only the sentimental believe in teachable moments. For the rest of us there is only disaster recovery.

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