The Standards of Liberal Journalism Are Every Bit as Real as ‘Haven Monahan’

Posted on | April 6, 2015 | 25 Comments

How about we start speaking some blunt truths?

Rolling Stone magazine perpetrated a hoax against the University of Virginia, doing “journalism” about an alleged gang rape that evidently never happened. The source of the dramatic tale Rolling Stone published last November, “A Rape on Campus,” was a UVA student named Jackie who has been proven to be a liar. Her freshman year at UVA, Jackie invented a make-believe boyfriend she called “Haven Monahan” as part of an unsuccessful attempt to inspire the jealousy of her friend Ryan Duffin, on whom she had a romantic crush. This deceptive scheme apparently led to Jackie’s subsequent claim that she was gang-raped at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house during a date with this non-existent boyfriend on the night of Sept. 28, 2012.
We didn’t learn the truth behind Jackie’s lies, however, until after Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s sensational article in Rolling Stone described in lurid detail how Jackie was allegedly raped by seven men at the Phi Kappa Psi house her freshman year. One of the first journalists to raise questions about the article, Richard Bradley wrote, “Something about this story doesn’t feel right,” and cited the obvious problems that any veteran editor would have noticed about the story. To believe the Rolling Stone story, Bradley argued, “requires a lot of leaps of faith. It requires you to indulge your pre-existing biases.” Yet these biases — a willingness to believe the worst about fraternity members, and about men in general — were precisely what led Erdely and her editors to publish the 9,000-word article that, they believed, would expose once and for all the reality of what feminists have claimed is a “rape epidemic” on college campuses.
Rolling Stone’s story was a lie and there is no such “epidemic.”
A lengthy examination of Erdely’s article by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism has exposed the inexcusable lapses in editorial judgment that resulted in Rolling Stone’s gross libel of UVA’s Phi Kappa Psi fraternity chapter. It is a near-certainty that the fraternity will sue for defamation, and it is difficult to imagine how Rolling Stone could successfully defend itself against such a suit. The magazine’s founder, Jann Wenner, told the New York Times that his staff was taken in by ”a really expert fabulist storyteller.” Yet as the Columbia review makes clear, Erdely and her editors did not take the most basic steps needed to verify (or debunk) Jackie’s tale.
Rolling Stone was grossly negligent, but this has been true of the entire profession of mainstream journalism in dealing with the claims made by feminists about the “rape epidemic” on America’s college and university campuses. These claims are as fictional as Jackie’s imaginary boyfriend “Haven Monahan.”. . .

Read the whole thing at The American Spectator.

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Category: American Spectator, Crime, Education, Journalism, Media Bias, Sex Trouble

Comments

25 Responses to “The Standards of Liberal Journalism Are Every Bit as Real as ‘Haven Monahan’”

Evan3457
April 6th, 2015 @ 11:11 am

Rolling Stone didn’t make any mistakes. They committed negligence, at the very least, and more likely, outright fraud in service of the leftist, despotic “narrative”.
Evi L. Bloggerlady
April 6th, 2015 @ 11:39 am

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-rRz6QkvhUNg/VSHt78VmExI/AAAAAAAAtKM/upAsOt-Als4/s1600/Screen%2BShot%2B2015-04-05%2Bat%2B7.21.37%2BPM.png
Fake Journalist Alyssa Marino wants to make “news” to promote her own career Rule 5 | Batshit Crazy News
April 6th, 2015 @ 11:43 am

[…] TOM: The standards of liberal journalism are as real as Jackie’s made up boyfriend […]
Evi L. Bloggerlady
April 6th, 2015 @ 11:44 am

Negligence is essentially a “mistake” when you have a duty to avoid that mistake. Rolling Stone went way beyond that.
K-Bob
April 6th, 2015 @ 11:49 am

Sorry for he O/T, but Google Maps has added a Pac Man game. FYI
texlovera
April 6th, 2015 @ 11:56 am

Some people seem surprised that neither Rolling Stone nor Teresa Sullivan have apologized for their indefensible actions.

Well, they’re in full-on freak-out “crap-we’re-gonna-get-our-ass-sued-off” mode…
Evan3457
April 6th, 2015 @ 11:57 am

When I say negligence, I’m supposing they (the management at Rolling Stone) trusted Edderly because so was “one of them”, and because the story was “too good not to be true”, rather than they knew how little actual information she had.

Even so, I said, “more likely” fraud.
The Media Cannot Be Trusted: Sabrina Rubin Erdely, Rolling Stone and UVA lies | Batshit Crazy News
April 6th, 2015 @ 12:28 pm

[…] TOM: The standards of liberal journalism are as real as Jackie’s made up boyfriend […]
Adobe_Walls
April 6th, 2015 @ 12:29 pm

The media has been advancing the leftist agenda since they invented radio.
Evi L. Bloggerlady
April 6th, 2015 @ 12:30 pm

They are water carriers for the Democrats
Daniel Freeman
April 6th, 2015 @ 12:42 pm

Well said. I like how you used this event to nail the media’s liberal bias to their political affiliation. They’ve been remarkably slippery about ducking each of them individually — well maybe we’re Democrats but that doesn’t mean we have a liberal bias, well maybe we’re liberal but that doesn’t mean we have a bias toward Democrats. Hopefully ducking both at once will be an impossible task.
CrustyB
April 6th, 2015 @ 1:23 pm

The UVA frat committed rape, Michael Brown had his hands up, Trayvon screamed for mercy on the ground as Zimmerman fired shots into him while uttering racial epithets, the Glock is a plastic gun that can’t be detected under x-ray machines…

At this point, can we assume that anything you learn from liberals or their press agency (IE mainstream media) is a lie unless it’s proven to be true?
Jeb Bush En Español | Regular Right Guy
April 6th, 2015 @ 2:05 pm

[…] The Standards of Liberal Journalism Are Every Bit as Real as ‘Haven Monahan’ […]
Adobe_Walls
April 6th, 2015 @ 2:06 pm

One can’t have objective standards, journalistic or other wise, when everything you know is untrue. Sabrina Rubin Erdely and Rolling Stone in particular and the left in general can’t not perpetrate hoax’s because they believe their own mythology. They believe the myth/hoax of rape culture, their premises are all fantastic. The difference between this hoax and all the hoaxes perpetrated daily by the media is it went to far, it exceeded the suspension of disbelief. Erdely’s sin wasn’t bad journalism, it was not anticipating that some might ask questions and get answers. If Erdley had known that ”Jackie’s” three friends weren’t willing to play their role as anonymous minor villains, she’d have to have been capable of questioning her premises. She never doubted ”Jackie’s” account of the actions and reactions of ”Jackie’s” friends, because telling a ”rape victim” to not report it, for their own selfish motives, is what happens in a ”Rape Culture”.
physicsnut
April 6th, 2015 @ 2:52 pm

was all that Trayvon “reporting” any better ?
or the “hands up” rubbish ?
– it isn’t reporting, it is incitement to riot. And they know it.
And they do it on purpose.
As if we didn’t know.
Rob Crawford
April 6th, 2015 @ 5:03 pm

I was going to say “unless it’s an objective measure” but then I remembered how the temperature history has been rewritten…

So, yeah.
jakee308
April 6th, 2015 @ 8:17 pm

Can we please name this story telling trouble maker?

Jackie (I don’t know what her full name is because everyone believes she should be able to hide her lying ass in anonymity) doesn’t deserve anonymity nor much benefit of the doubt at this point.

What’s her real name and how about we all start using it?
Steve White
April 6th, 2015 @ 9:29 pm

Too bad Andrew Breitbart isn’t still around. He’d find Jackie and interview her.
NRPax
April 7th, 2015 @ 5:59 am

Somewhere in America, Ryan Duffin is realizing that he dodged a bullet.
Steve Skubinna
April 7th, 2015 @ 10:21 am

We’ve all already seen it, but go ahead and do a web search on Micheal Crichton and the Gell-Mann Effect.

It cannot be overstressed.
Steve Skubinna
April 7th, 2015 @ 10:27 am

He probably owes that Haven Monahan dude a beer or two.
Matthew W
April 7th, 2015 @ 10:33 am

This goes closer to “Depraved indifference.”
Eagle_Eyed
April 7th, 2015 @ 3:34 pm

I don’t know, he sounded amazingly obtuse in that ABC interview. He was still sure, that *something* happened to her, but that “it was definitely a real possibility” that she made much of it up.
NRPax
April 7th, 2015 @ 4:13 pm

I don’t trust any media outlet to paint people in a flattering light. And I have a feeling that when he gets to 30, realization will set in.
Ethics in Doxxing? : The Other McCain
April 13th, 2015 @ 11:23 am

[…] Count me as skeptical. I’m aware that the Social Justice Warriors count that as a “win,” but as I pointed out in January 2013, it would be kind of hard to cover up a crime that had already been the subject of a 6,000-word New York Times article. While the SJWs may still be high-fiving each other over Steubenville, I’m still unconvinced that they really accomplished anything that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. Furthermore, I suspect, the general impression created by the Steubenville vigilantes — i.e., that gang-rape is a common occurrence that is routinely covered up by officials — helped lead Sabrina Rubin Erdely and Rolling Stone into the horrible journalistic fiasco of the UVA rape hoax. […]