Columbia Graduate School of Journalism issues scathing report on Rolling Stone rape story (Photo : Facebook)
Rolling Stone will be more thorough with its reporting and editorial practices from now on, after Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism criticised and proved that their article titled "A Rape On Campus" based on an alleged account of rape in the Unversity of Virginia campus, had major flaws, and discredited them for their failures at every level, from reporting to editing to fact-checking, according to The Washington Post.
The author of that article is Sabrina Rubin Erdely. She had telephoned the victim, who is being referred as Jackie in the report. Erdely has completely relied on the information given by the victim and not tried contacting the people who were involved in the incident.
A three-member team compiled a 12000 word report. The Columbia Graduate School of Journalism stated in the report that the magazine lacked reporting skills, proper editorial supervision, and fact analysis.
According to the report Erdely, and her editors failed to observe basic journalistic rules in reporting out the story and relied on a single source which is the victim Jackie herself.
During the process of reporting the story both the reporter and the editors neglected the basic protocol, they were meant to follow. If the procedure had been followed properly they would have realized that Jackie was not a very reliable source.
The people who were involved in the story were not contacted and the victim's word was taken for truth when she stated that they have refused to talk, neither was there any effort made to find the person who was accused. The story's fact checking was done on phone, which was a four hour long conversation with Jackie, it was stated by the fact checker that the scenes were described very vividly by the victim, there was no doubt that she was speaking the truth, as reported by MSNBC News.
The report is accompanied by a statement from Rolling Stone's Managing Editor Will Dana who has apologized for the flaws and the failure of the story and retracted the story. The students from the University of Virginia stated that the story did not combat the issue of sexual violence but has aggravated the problem to a higher extent.
