Did you reply to the right person? I feel like this has nothing to do with what I said…
This is a false choice. The default response to these situations should be “I don’t know. Give me more info.” Withholding judgement until you have enough information to reach a conclusion is seen as wisdom until things become political, then it suddenly becomes a bad thing.
And fake stories and trying to railroad people helps future victims how?
We’ll see what the courts say.
Straw men do burn brightly, but they are not useful. I’m sure rapes have occurred, but choosing one organization on the basis of a known liar’s (sorry " fabulist") story and smearing them doesn’t seem to help.
How easy will it be for a rape victim to get believed after this?
How easy was it before?
Hint: think of all the rape stories that aren’t written about in publications, or are extremely one-sided to protect the attacker. Think of the fact that the majority of rapes aren’t even investigated…and that’s of the ones that are reported. How much worse can it get, now that one writer at one magazine was overzealous in reporting specific details about a long-standing problem?
There will be more articles. It will become harder to get away with raping people. This is a good thing.
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How will it be better? It astonishes me how little the facts matter. “The story was a lie, the source was unreliable, the magazine has admitted it, but yay!” If this frat actually was the sexual assault factory they made it out to be, they’d have been able to find credible evidence.
Plus the quaint old idea of “innocent until proven guilty” is kind of important…I’m so old that I remember when liberals thought do too. Guess I just don’t get it. “Group X did something wrong…go grab some Xs and we’ll punish them…doesn’t matter if you get the wrong ones, it’ll teach the rest a lesson.” Seems to me I’ve heard that logic before.
So whose name was dragged in the mud for being the supposed attacker? Oh, yeah, right: no one’s. Meanwhile, there has been credible evidence linking quite a number of sexual assault cases to that particular fraternity. You do know that other frat members have been censured by that university for exactly the same charges, right? The details about this particular situation are not clear, and it is important to catch lapses like this, but that doesn’t mean the crime as described didn’t happen. It just can’t be proved…which is often the case in these situations.
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I kind of agree with your first sentence, in that each workplace has to work out its own tolerance for mistakes (and in this case, has to decide its tolerance for the hit to its credibility). But I disagree with the second sentence. The analogy I would make is this: I fully expect that Yo-Yo Ma, Perlman, Gil Shaham, et al will occasionally play a note out of tune, and even once in a while flub a passage… but I never expect them to completely forget which hand to hold the bow in or forget which piece they are playing this evening. This particular mistake is larger than just “oops, well, nobody’s perfect”.
This is pretty much the definition of what is usually derided as “truthiness”.
[quote=“stinkinbadgers, post:29, topic:55024”]I kind of agree with your first sentence, in that each workplace has to work out its own tolerance for mistakes (and in this case, has to decide its tolerance for the hit to its credibility). But I disagree with the second sentence. The analogy I would make is this: I fully expect that Yo-Yo Ma, Perlman, Gil Shaham, et al will occasionally play a note out of tune, and even once in a while flub a passage… but I never expect them to completely forget which hand to hold the bow in or forget which piece they are playing this evening. This particular mistake is larger than just “oops, well, nobody’s perfect”.[/quote]The magnitude of a mistake’s outcome is not always commensurate with the magnitude of the mistake. The mistake was to not investigate the claims of a primary source as much as you should, a mistake that was made by Erdely and then repeated by everyone else in Rolling Stone at every stage of the article. The outcome of this mistake was catastrophic. It was awful for the university, it was awful for the credibility of rape victims, it was awful for the reputation of rolling stone. It was a catastrophe.
But not checking up on sources enough is a mistake that has been made by every news outlet ever, probably on a fairly regular basis. These writers are pumping out articles on tight schedule, and are probably understaffed. Checking up on everything falls to the wayside when you have what you believe to be a credible source giving you information that seems complete and self-consistent.
I think I’ve missed where the courts are involved in this particular case.
Here?
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To be fair, Yo-Yo Ma doesn’t have to deal with bows and violins that change places when he puts them down, or music that changes identity. To be deceived is no sin at all. Whether the journalist is responsible alone for practicing due diligence or it’s the responsibility of the whole editorial team is the question, and the team seems to have decided it’s the latter case here. Maybe the whole team should be sacked?
Fair enough. Still, to be pedantic, perhaps, the question isn’t about “due process” even if Rolling Stone is being sued by the University. As this article says, that will probably come down to whether RS acted maliciously, which is a different thing.
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FYI: Yo-Yo Ma identifies as male.
Oops! Edited.
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