Rolling Stone has been in the news a lot lately because, after hearing about criminal activity during a fraternity party, they ran a story about the guilt of the fraternity brothers without picking up the phone and calling to inquire “Were you guys having a party on this particular night?” (Wikipedia). The New York Times, hard on the heels of incorrectly predicting a victory for Ellen Pao in her sex discrimination lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins, ran a story about how the fraternity can’t expect to win a libel lawsuit. It seems that, even with unlimited domestic long distance calling, calling the fraternity was too much to expect from Rolling Stone.
What would actual journalism look like? Check “The Kings of the Desert” from this week’s New Yorker magazine. Most of the action happens in Bahrain, the events are much more complex than what some college students supposedly did during a party, and most of the people with relevant knowledge speak Arabic as a first language. Yet the writer, Nicholas Schmidle, manages to get and present most sides of the story (though the guy who apparently ended up with most of the cash declined to be interviewed).
Apparently, Erdely did call the frat and asked them (purposely) vague questions: “I’ve heard that there was a gang rape at your frat some time last year – do you care to comment?” , which limited the ability of the frat to do anything but issue a weak denial that made them look even more guilty. She completely failed to contact Jackie’s friends who would have contradicted her account of the (non)fateful night and then put words in their mouth that made them seem like totally callous jerks – “If you call the police about this vicious gang rape on broken glass that you have just endured, no one will invite us to their frat parties.”
The NYT article misstates the standard for a libel claim by a public figure (assuming that the frat even is a public figure – it’s not so clear to me that they are). There are two possible elements to “actual malice” – one (the only one that they mention) is that RS published with actual knowledge of falsity. If this alone was the standard, then the NYT reporter would probably be right because absent a smoking gun this is very difficult to prove. However, reckless disregard of truth or falsity is also considered actual malice. Personally I think that a reasonable jury could find that Erdely’s and RS’s conduct meets the threshold of recklessness. Since the NYT is batting 1000 on their track record of incorrectly predicting verdicts with ideological implications, it wouldn’t surprise me if they got this one wrong too. The lesson for RS is to try to seat a jury consisting only of NY Times reporters.
The NY Times and RS seem to have a common modus operandi – when you run a story you FIRST reach the conclusion that your ideological biases tell you to reach and then you go shopping for sources who will back up your conclusion. Then when the verdict goes the “wrong” way, you say that while this particular case was a not proven, this does not negate the larger principle that (fraternities,VC firms, etc.) really are dens of sexism and rape. Heads I win, tails you lose.
So, Philip, you probably heard of Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect? How do you know you are not suffering from it when you praise “The Kings of the Desert”?
Algirdas: http://seekerblog.com/2006/01/31/the-murray-gell-mann-amnesia-effect/ is something I hadn’t seen before. I probably am suffering from it because I once met the great physicist and yet I have no recollection of what he said!
It’s funny because I was thinking of the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect as I was reading the NYT article about libel, which misstates the law in a way that even a 1st year law student would recognize. I see the article was written not by someone from their legal desk but someone from their media desk.
The eagerness to absolve Jackie of all responsibility also has elements of the backward causation (“wet streets causes rain”) that Crichton mentions:
“This failure was not the subject’s or the source’s fault,” …. “It was the product of failed methodology.”
Now while it’s true that Erdely and RS were amply at fault for being so gullible (more on this in a second), Jackie must share in the blame for having fabricated an elaborate “catfishing” scheme and standing by it repeatedly (to this day she has not admitted that the entire thing was fabricated). Regarding gullibility, Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
The very first paragraph in “Kings of the Desert” seems really implausible to me:
“When Glenn Stewart enrolled at the University of Oxford, in 1975, he was not a typical first-year student: a twenty-year-old American with mediocre grades, he had taken neither A-level exams nor Oxford’s entrance test. But he had an unusual degree of confidence, and, after securing a strong reference from an English grammar school that he’d attended for a year, he persuaded an Oxford admissions officer to let him in.”
How likely is that, really?
From Glen Stewart’s Linkedin profile: https://www.linkedin.com/pub/glenn-stewart/11/32a/11b, after getting a degree in Oriental Studies from Oxford, he went on to spend three years at Golden Gate College in California, where he managed 48 of 54 credits toward an MBA.
Seems even less plausible, to me, at least.