Rolling Stone/Rape/Erdely

Don't believe everything you read.

Or to put it more bluntly, if "Rolling Stone" can get it wrong, what makes you so sure what's on Fox News is correct?

In the information age, we've got plenty of gossip, a lot of rabble-rousing, but truth can be hard to find. Because not everyone wants to go on the record, because people shade the story to their advantage, because reporters want to become famous.

HUH?

Go back to Judith Miller. If she hadn't been writing in the "New York Times" would liberals have voted for an Iraq invasion? A lot fewer, that's for sure. People trusted the "Times."

And we used to trust "Rolling Stone."

The biggest story today is the Viacom write-down. How long did we have to hear that MTV raped the music industry? But all these years later, MTV has few salable assets and the record companies have catalogs that will seemingly never expire, and the acts built upon MTV's base are still touring to this day. Would anybody in the U.S. want to see Culture Club otherwise? But few employ the long perspective. Because we live in an immediate gratification culture where how you look is more important than who you are. Lease a mansion and a sports car and people will think you're rich when the truth is your bank account is empty and you're two months from bankruptcy while the person driving a Chevy and paying down his mortgage is prepared for retirement. Then again, you never thought you'd live that long.

I never thought I'd live so long that "Rolling Stone" would have no fold, never mind be shrunk down to the size of other magazines. "Rolling Stone" was a paragon of music news, both criticism and in-depth reportage, and it made its bones on the back of the Patty Hearst story, which it got first. That's why they made that movie "Perfect." Suddenly our media won.

But now it's lost.

Because the writer wanted to be a star.

That's the story here. Not that "Rolling Stone" didn't exhibit enough skepticism, although with Matt Taibbi off on what turned out to be a brief hejira in the online world they needed someone new they could hang their reputation on.

Turns out she blew it up.

At least "Rolling Stone" has a fact-checking apparatus, unlike so many publications. But when a writer hears something too good to be true, he never prints it without hearing it from another source, because of the spin.

That's right, people have an agenda. That's why famous people talk to the press, to get their viewpoint across. And sure, there are mentally ill persons like Jackie telling fibs, and everybody wants to be nationally known, but if your business is telling the story, you've got to get it right.

The main culprit here is Sabrina Rubin Erdely's methodology. She had a precept, all she needed was to fill in the details. Campuses are a hotbed of rape, fraternities are bad, and if we just reveal these details there will be change. But this is not how a reporter does her job. A reporter might have the outlines of a concept, and then she fleshes out the details and finds out if she has a story. Which she might not. Which might be different from what she first believed. I'm telling you now, not every CEO is a crook. Not every politician has done heinous things. Sometimes you find out the people you hate are actually nice, when you get to know them. But most people never get access. What if Ms. Erdely had hung with the frat brothers? Would she have written the same story? Would she have found out that all of them were Neanderthals? But she didn't do this, it would mess with her world vision. Everybody's fearful the facts will get in the way of their vision.

Like the fact that Obamacare is working. The right wing hates this, so they just state that it isn't.

Kind of like bilingual education. Sounded good to liberals, but the truth is its efficacy is weak at best.

Life is about the middle. The gray. And we trust our news sources to suss out the truth and bring us together.

But "Rolling Stone" pushed us apart. And now Jann Wenner says no one is going to lose their job.

WHAT?

Kill someone and you go to jail. Cheat and you get expelled from college. Perpetrate a myth that hurts real people and it's business as usual? OF COURSE ERDELY SHOULD LOSE HER JOB! Judith Miller did.

Just because you admit you're wrong, have an outside source investigate you, just because you go the extra mile that others will not, that does not absolve you of responsibility.

We've got to show people that not only are we correcting processes, we're correcting behavior of individuals. If Erdely doesn't lose her job, why should anyone else at "Rolling Stone" be afraid, why should anyone else worry about getting it right?

Tony Wilson taught me a lesson. You remember Anthony, the star of not only "24 Hour Party People," but Manchester, England England, the perpetrator of Joy Division and New Order and the Hacienda. Well, Tony started off in television news. And one night the anchor read the football scores wrong. He blamed Tony, the researcher. Tony blamed the anchor. But the boss believed the anchor, and he told Tony he should fire him, but he was going to give him one more chance. Why? Not because anybody really cares about the football scores, they fade away in a day, but because if they can't get the football scores right, viewers won't believe they can get the big stories right, like war and diplomacy.

I've got no faith that "Rolling Stone" can get the big stories right. Because they had the twenty first century reaction. They apologized, went to intellectual rehab, and there were no consequences. But what about the frat brothers, what about UVA? But that's collateral damage, the institution must live on.

Like the aforementioned Fox News, which rips reputations willy-nilly and perpetrates a false viewpoint all in the name of right wing demagoguery. Bill O'Reilly can never lose his job, his ratings are too high. But at least Brian Williams got suspended, as he should have, because the news isn't about stardom, but TRUSTWORTHINESS!

Who do we trust in the digital age?

Not Mark Zuckerberg. He just wants your private information to sell to advertisers.

Amazon specializes in putting competitors out of business, they're no different from a pitcher who puts tar on the ball.

And Google competes with Apple by giving away its main product, its mobile operating system, for free.

And Steve Jobs illegally rigs the employment system, preventing job mobility via agreement with Apple's competitors not to poach.

And how do we know all this?

THE NEWS!

Brad Stone's Amazon book is an account to be read by all.

The rest comes out in the paper. Pros dedicated to the truth more than fame.

But they're rarely rich. And we keep on hearing that the newspapers are toast. And no one takes a long view.

And the truth is BuzzFeed is MTV. All those online news services of the moment, they're gonna burn out, there's nothing there. No reporting, only stealing. At the end of the day, real reporting survives.

Maybe not in "Rolling Stone," but...

When competitors come along you don't get down in the gutter, you climb up, you become even more of an authority. We're hungry for facts, for truth, where are we going to get them?

"Rolling Stone" put a stake in its own heart. And by not firing Erdely they've become laughable. There are consequences in life, and one of them is if you screw up, you pay.

Erdely screwed up. Maybe she should never write again. Pete Rose can't be in the Hall of Fame.

But in today's rich and famous world we circle the wagons and defend our friends. That's the college story, the groupthink. Not only the frat brothers, but the women labeling all men as potential rapists.

The truth is somewhere in the middle. Like a very few men perpetrate most of the rapes. That was in the "New York Times." But that doesn't make headlines. Better to believe UVA is unsafe and you can get raped if you walk by the Row.

I don't want to see any woman raped.

But I don't want to live in an hysterical culture where good stories trump facts.

And it's not only "Rolling Stone." A scientist wanted to become famous so he falsified data and said vaccines cause autism. And now measles have returned because the so-called "educated" class has read his report and wants the best for their children. Meanwhile, no amount of data can convince them otherwise.

I don't know what the rape situation is on campus.

But one thing I'm sure of, "Rolling Stone"'s story has added to my confusion.

Just give me some truth.


--
Visit the archive: http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/
--
http://www.twitter.com/lefsetz
--
If you would like to subscribe to the LefsetzLetter,
http://www.lefsetz.com/lists/?p=subscribe&id=1

If you do not want to receive any more LefsetzLetters, http://lefsetz.com/lists/?p=unsubscribe&uid=0eecea7b60b461717065cbde887c8e25

To change your email address http://lefsetz.com/lists/?p=preferences&uid=0eecea7b60b461717065cbde887c8e25




-- powered by phpList, www.phplist.com --