MEGAN MCARDLE ON JOURNALISM AND LIES:
As any journalist or cop or lawyer or academic can tell you, reality is usually complicated. Eyewitnesses are unreliable, narratives are cloudy, the data you want is missing or never existed, people seeking money or power have pushed deep into legal gray zones without quite breaking the law. It’s not that clearer stories don’t exist — Bernie Madoff committed a very clear-cut and mediagenic crime. But those stories are hard to find, because the perpetrators are at pains to conceal their actions.
Fabricators can create exactly the sort of story that becomes front-page news: an obvious and sympathetic victim, a clearly identified perpetrator who obviously broke the law, vivid details to hold the listener’s attention. They don’t need to backtrack and say “Oh, wait, no, that happened three weeks earlier” the way that real witnesses often do, or shamefacedly confess, when confronted, that they maybe left out a few parts of the story that didn’t put them in the most flattering light. In other words, they can give us exactly the sort of story that can get us a prize, because they aren’t constrained by the often banal and frequently ambiguous details of anything that actually happened. The very reason people like Stephen Glass and Jack Kelley were so successful was that lies generally make better copy than reality.
I’m not saying that most of the amazing scoops that get printed are false. On the contrary. But it is true that journalists get offered many, many amazing scoops that simply won’t stand up to scrutiny. We keep them out of the news stream by carefully checking the stories for inconsistencies and offering the accused the opportunity to respond. Thankfully, fabrications frequently reveal themselves as questionable when you try to corroborate the details — often because these oft-rehearsed tales are carefully set up to be completely impossible to check, and the source disappears when you press. There’s also a reason that so many of the worst fabrications we know about were created by journalists, who knew exactly what they had to do to get the story through the system.
Unfortunately, reporting by others suggests that Erdely didn’t do one of the basic things that reporters do to try to keep fabrications or exaggerations out of our stories: Check with the other side. It now seems clear that her story has always been essentially a single-source story; she spoke to Jackie, and people who heard the story from Jackie, none of whom turn out to have pressed Jackie for such details as the names of the accused. According to the Washington Post, when Erdely did press, Jackie tried to back out.
Going ahead at that point, in my opinion, pretty much turned Erdely from a victim of fraud into a collaborator in it. When your single source doesn’t want to stand behind the story. . . .
Related thoughts from Hanna Rosin. “One thing we know is that Rolling Stone did a shoddy job reporting, editing, and fact-checking the story and an even shoddier job apologizing.”
Plus: “Fake rape allegations may be very rare but they have a huge impact, especially when they get so much attention.” How do we know that they’re very rare?