Back on Wednesday a friend called to point out that the stunning Washington Post article by T. Rees Shapiro was written to make clear to people with good reading comprehension skills that Jackie’s concoction most likely involved her trying to make poor “Randall” jealous by catfishing suitor/rapist “Drew” into electronic existence using text messages. But, he pointed out, you can easily miss that if you aren’t a good reader; and the majority of the press will likely try to make this lurid story turn into a blurry mishmash so that few members of the public will notice and even fewer will remember what an absurd fiasco it all was.

You can see that developing this weekend with further interviews from other newslets with the three ex-friends that ignore the outrageous catfishing angle and instead concentrate on boring aspects of how the three ex-friends didn’t tell Jackie not to go to the cops and how Sabrina Rubin Erdely violated technical-sounding journalistic methodologies. For example, from late Sunday, here’s the Associated Press’s “Big Story:”

Friends say they pushed UVA ‘Jackie’ to call cops

By MATT STROUD

Dec. 14, 2014 11:32 PM EST CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (AP) — Three friends of an alleged victim of gang rape at a University of Virginia frat house say a magazine article wrongly portrayed them as uncaring students who were more concerned about their reputations than her well-being. The friends told The Associated Press that the Rolling Stone article was wrong on a number of key points, especially its assertion that they urged the victim to not report the attack. … None of the three friends was contacted by Rolling Stone’s reporter, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, before the article was published; each of them rejected multiple assertions made in the article, which has since been retracted. All three say Erdely has since reached out to them, and that she has told them she is re-reporting the story.

I’ve been leaked the draft of Erdely’s “re-reported” article. Here it is in full:

Keep Calm and Oh, Look! A Squirrel!

Back to AP’s not-so-Big Story:

Hendley told the AP Erdely apologized to her for portraying her the way she did. Erdely and Rolling Stone Managing Editor Will Dana did not respond to an email from The Associated Press on Sunday morning seeking comment.

[Yawn]

The three friends say they continue to work on correcting the record about what happened that night, and at least one, [“Randall”], wonders to what extent he believes the victim’s own version of what happened

This could be good!

— or whether any discrepancies in her story matter.

No, I guess it won’t be …

“People at U.Va. want answers just as much as I do,” Duffin [“Randall”] says. “But if anything, the takeaway from all this is that I still don’t really care if what’s presented in this article is true or not because I think it’s far more important that people focus on the issue of sexual assault as a whole.”

Now, it could be that the three ex-friends have decided upon a new, more prudent media strategy to keep the rape-crazed True Believers away from them of making the story as boring as possible while still denying Erdely’s charges. But why then start to use your real names?

You know, Mr. AP Reporter, the guy’s got a cell phone with text messages and photos on it. You could ask about them. According to the Washington Post:

Randall provided The Post with pictures that Jackie’s purported date had sent of himself by text message in 2012. The Post identified the person in the pictures and learned that his name does not match the one Jackie gave friends in 2012. In an interview, the man said he was Jackie’s high school classmate but “never really spoke to her.” The man said he was never a U-Va. student and is not a member of any fraternity. Additionally, he said that he had not visited Charlottesville in at least six years and that he was in another state participating in an athletic event during the weekend of Sept. 28, 2012. “I have nothing to do with it,” he said. He said it appears that the circulated photos were pulled from social media Web sites. After the alleged attack, the chemistry student who Jackie said had taken her on the date wrote an e-mail to Randall, passing along praise that Jackie apparently had for him. Randall said it is apparent to him that he is the “first year” student that the chemistry upperclassman described in text messages, since he had rebuffed Jackie’s advances.

You know and I know that this is explosive stuff, but nobody at the Associated Press seems to have noticed. In particular, the text message from the Jackie’s dream date/ rape organizer after the purported gang rape is an obvious glitch in The Matrix. If Jackie had a confederate sending texts, this person apparently wasn’t apprised of Jackie’s latest improvisation; or if Jackie were sending the text messages herself from a burner phone, well, she’s just not a Gone Girl-quality plotter.

Here’s perhaps the most interesting summation that the Washington Post allowed itself:

Before Jackie’s date, the friends became suspicious that perhaps they hadn’t really been in contact with the chemistry student at all, they said.

Besides the media’s general nervous breakdown since the November Elections, part of what’s going on is the Sapir-Whorf Effect in action. I’ve never seen the movie “Catfish,” a purported documentary about a young man about the age of Randall being duped via misleading messages, but at least since the movie came out I now know the word “catfish.” It’s a pungent, memorable word for a rather complex activity that has been around for a long time but has become much more technologically convenient to pull off in recent years.

But if the word “catfish” doesn’t appear in the Washington Post article, will you think of it? But if you don’t think of it, it’s a lot harder to organize Shapiro’s reporting conceptually in your head. Especially when a lot of people don’t want you to get the joke.