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Media

Flawed editing policies to blame for Rolling Stone fiasco

By
Keith J. Kelly
Published April 6, 2015, 10:21 p.m. ET

Jann Wenner’s flawed editing policy at Rolling Stone — not the subject of the now-discredited “A Rape on Campus” story — is the real reason for the publishing debacle, the author of a report on the matter said Monday.

“We disagree with any suggestion that it was the subject’s fault,” Steve Coll, the dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, said during a press conference to discuss his 13,000-word report on the fiasco, which Rolling Stone has asked him to investigate.

Coll’s conclusion counters the claim by Wenner, the Rolling Stone publisher, that the subject of the story, whom the magazine called “Jackie,” was to blame for the journalist disaster.

Wenner called her “a really expert fabulist storyteller.”

Coll, however, said the story was “a product of failed methodology, a failure of journalism.”

The Charlottesville, Va., police — the University of Virginia was the setting for the alleged sex assault — last month said they could find no evidence to support the allegations and that the subject had failed to cooperate with the investigations.

RS, after holes began appearing in the story, backed away from Jackie’s version in early December.

Despite the “failure of journalism” that the report found, Wenner said he was not going to fire Managing Editor Will Dana or Editor Sean Woods or disallow writer Sabrina Rubin Erdely to contribute to RS again.

The report said that “basic journalism practices” by Erdely should have unearthed many of the inconsistencies in the story prior to publication. “She could have walked away from the story,” said Sheila Coronel, the Columbia Dean of Academics, who assisted with the report.

“The editors and writers took shelter in the defense that they were too sympathetic to Jackie’s position,” said Coll. “But the failure was not related to that struggle.”

“The problem was with the methodology,” said Coronel.

Coll stopped short of calling for staff firings, however.

“We did not find evidence of the kind of dishonesty, invention of facts, lying to colleagues, plagiarism, that in our experience, and probably yours, would be grounds for automatic firing or severe sanctions,” said Coll.

A huge part of the problem, according to Coll, is that RS had quotes ascribed to three friends of Jackie even though the magazine did not know their identities and had not contacted them prior to publication.

The quotes were all supplied by Jackie, but there was no effort to alert readers that it was all coming from a single source.

Post-publication, the friends came forward to say that they never uttered the words attributed to them and disputed key elements of Jackie’s story.

Wenner declined comment on Coll’s comments.