My personal fav!
Cameron as Scarlet tho? Now that’s a bridge too far…
It’s only dirty the first time… [brp]
Lie back and think of England?
TBH - it’s pretty clear the guy was fired for dissing his editor, not writing a bad review.
Janni Wenner Janni Wenner, Rolling Stone’s most fearless leader
Sacked a guy for throwin’ shade, yet Erdely still gets paid.
Funny idea, but man, this guy needs some pitch correction. It hurts.
Wait, so why the hell did they publish the review in the first place?
Partway through the first sentence I encountered the phrase “that strata”.
Clean out your desk; you’re fired.
I find this whole Rolling Stone scandal one of the worst kinds of journalistic miscodnuct. It has not only hurt individuals who were accused of rape without sufficient evidence (a stain that is hard to remove), it has hurt every legitimate rape victim (including perhaps Jackie, the accuser in the UVA case) who will no doubt point to this this debacle as evidence of the problems that come with reporting rape. This isn’t just the kind of thing that should get a reporter fired, it’s the kind of thing that ought to shutter a magazine.
Shit. MRAs will be bringing this Rolling Stone debacle up for the next twenty years.
Maybe the difference here is that doing a story about rape on campus is orders of magnitude more difficult than doing a record review, and therefore there’s a reason to be more forgiving when the former gets screwed up. DeRogatis should have been happy that he was being paid to write record reviews in the first place. It’s the sort of monetized-hobby non-job, like being paid to play videogames, that teenagers like to dream of having but that no grown-ass adult should reasonably expect to get.
Or perhaps the people who think due process should be a thing.
“Screwed up”? How about “manufactured from whole cloth and utterly unverified all the way through the editorial process”?
So the issue was “bad writing”, not a “bad review”?
Now imagine if he had savaged the album a la the reviews in Vice, where the reviews are brutal, but hilariously written.
Hootie deserves nothing less.
Why do people insist that individuals should be fired for a single mistake? Even a big fuck-up like this could still come out of good-faith reporting by a normally diligent reporter with years of experience and a good track record.
If it weren’t for the fact that over the years many other victims of rape on that very campus have written publicly – and in some cases gotten at least some official censure against their attackers – your concern over the details of this one particular article would make more sense. Fact is, the problem there is real. This particular story didn’t get it right, but that doesn’t mean the larger story isn’t true.
This is a horrible situation as everyone is happy to point out. But it is also a conversation that needed to be had, and still needs to be grappled with. Where is the line between respecting the victim of sexual violence and discovering the truth. Both the victim and the truth deserve the utmost respect, so best practices need to be created. However that line will always exist, and given the tendency of victims to tell the truth, and those being “slandered” to lie I’m going to stick with giving preference to the victims. If anything the rush to hold this story up in the air like a trophy by MRAs, Frats, and Universities rather than discuss the issue it poorly dealt with is more damning than a piece of bad reporting.
Strictly speaking, the concept of due process only applies to legal proceedings. Even if you extend the concept metaphorically to journalism, as I understand the Rolling Stone rape article, it mentioned no alleged perps by name, so no one was deprived of their civil rights by the fabricated portions of the story.
It shouldn’t have happened, but the reason it shouldn’t have happened had nothing to do with due process or lack of it.
The retraction implies that only the account given by Jackie was unsubstantiated, and that other cases were on firmer ground. I hope you don’t cleave to the view that no-one has ever been raped on the University of Virginia campus.
