Posted on 12/07/2014 12:42:04 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
Rolling Stones journalist Sabrina Rubin Erdely has written yet another problematic story, GotNews.com has learned.
Erdely may be in the news these days for a botched story on an alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia but writing thinly sourced problematic stories isn’t a new occurrence for her.
One of Erdely’s most celebrated works of journalism, also for Rolling Stone, is full of unsubstantiated claims and tentative connections written in a ham-handed attempt to politicize a series of personal tragedies. The story, published in 2012 and titled “School of Hate,” tries to drag then-Congresswoman Michele Bachmann into complicity in a wave of suicides that struck a school district she represented.
The connection? Some of those students who killed themselves were gay.
Though Erdely herself admits in the story that some of the students who killed themselves were not gay or connected to the reported struggles of gay teenagers, she nevertheless frames the story as if the suicides are the result of a stately neutral policy concerning school officials instructing students about homosexuality. A policy that was the result of parents and local leaders asking to have their Christian children spared any public teaching about homosexuality.
For Erdely a policy of neutrality encourages bullying and somehow offered a silent consent from the school for the troubled teens to kill themselves. To back up her claims Erdely continuously quotes the troubled students and uses their version of events as the official narrative. In at least one case, that of Justin Aaberg, Erdely gives descriptions of events from the perspective of the already deceased student relying on third party information.
In all the detailed cases of teen suicide bullying based on sexual orientation is fingered as the culprit and conservative groups positioned as the villains for daring to want a neutral policy on homosexuality from school officials. The fact that many schools have this policy and have had a neutral policy on teaching homosexuality for generations without a wave of suicides is apparently irrelevant.
Whether the events alleged by the teenage students, many of whom were hospitalized for psychiatric reasons, happened at all or in the way they described them remains unknown. What is known is that Erdely has a pattern of taking one view of a story and generalizing it to the entire situation. Something she clearly demonstrated in both the stories on University of Virginia and “School of Hate.” Not surprisingly it is a liberal storyline that castes those celebrating tradition in the church or fraternity house as monsters.
Though Rolling Stone issued a retraction for the UVA story, they have yet to take back Erdely’s hit piece on Michele Bachmann.
The activist gay organization GLAAD even awarded Erdeley for her thinly sourced journalism.
Award-winning freelance magazine journalist
“Sabrina Rubin Erdely is an award-winning feature writer and investigative journalist, and a Contributing Editor at Rolling Stone. Her work has also appeared in SELF, GQ, Philadelphia, The New Yorker, Mother Jones, Glamour and Men’s Health, among other national magazines. Her articles have been anthologized in Best American Magazine Writing and have received a number of awards, including two National Magazine Award nominations.
Erdely specializes in long-form narrative writing, especially about crime, health and social issues. She has written about con artists, murder investigations, vicious divorces, power brokers, lovable eccentrics, bioweapons, cults, sexual violence, medical ethics, hackers, LGBT issues, and teachers who have affairs with students—among other subjects.”
......[As of 3:15 PM Eastern Time, despite the retraction having been news for a few hours, Mr. Erdely has posted nothing to her Twitter feed despite having used that feed to try to attract as much attention as possible to her work of at-least-part-fiction.]....."
this is an agenda driven journalist. Her goal is to advance liberalism and if the facts don’t back up her agenda then she’ll discard it.
I’m sure the Obama regime will hire her after Josh Earnest leaves.
I read the article when first released. It seemed impossible
to believe. I’m two generations past that, but, this article was bs.
To be (perhaps overly) fair to Rolling Stone and Erdeley, you see “journalism” similar to this on the right also.
Stories of horrific misconduct by police, Child Protetive Services, governments, courts, etc. are produced, often sourced entirely from grieving families, losers of lawsuits, attorneys for one side in a dispute, etc.
The problem is that what is presented is not “the truth” of what happened, to the extent it can be determined, it is one person’s or one side’s story of what happened.
As anybody who has ever sat through a trial can attest, the first side presented often sounds utterly convincing - until the other side presents its case too.
Many of the stories we’ve seen in recent years involving Trayvon, Ferguson, Eric Garner, etc. fall into this pattern. It’s not so much that the story presented is untrue (although that may sometimes be the case) as that only one side of the story is presented.
The “journalists” involved aren’t reporting on what happened to the extent they can determine it, they’re presenting a case for making changes to society. They’re advocates, not reporters.
Nothing wrong with advocates for a cause, except when they’re pretending to be reporters.
Much of this is the fault of modern liberal ideas about the job of journalism being not to present the truth as best it can determined but to “change the world.” Those attitudes can also affect conservatives.
When we read a story, I think we should try to remember that it may be presenting only one side. While “the other side” may not have a very good story, it DOES have a story.
Rolling Stone has always been a lying leftist rag. When P J O’Rourke started sucking up to Rolling Stone, I knew he was a fraud.
Yup. Notice how rapidly it fell apart when challenged.
I find it intriguing how long it was after the article was published before serious scrutiny started. Something like 10 days.
Here on FR, the disassembly of Dan Rather started within minutes of his “fake but accurate” story.
Possibly the Rolling Stone story took so long to be looked at carefully because it tied in so well to what we’ve been conditioned to think of as fact.
Even most of those who initially challenged the story did so very gingerly.
The funniest and saddest (at the same time) thing is that here was a story about how awful and unjustified it is to be skeptical about reports of rape. And its primary effect is to provide a case study of why such skepticism may be justified.
IOW, it’s difficult to see how they could have damaged their own cause more thoroughly.
Yes, she is. To me she’s just another Stephen Glass of The New Republic, or Jason Blair from NYT - a liar.
At best, a forgiving philosophy of advocacy journalism.
Regardless of advocacy, fact stretching, not fact checking or outright lies, it is the responsibility of the outlet - the publisher - to verify truth in what it prints. That is journalism.
So if Rolling Stone had any integrity, the editor should sit down with his lawyer, across the table from Erdely and her lawyer and start going through her ‘articles’ she’s had published and start asking which ones are lies.
A leftist, homosexual-worshipping, activist, radical feminist Jew who lied in a magazine article? Is the source reliable? I have a hard time bringing this into focus.
Yup. Rolling Stone has, if nothing else, scored a huge own goal against its credibility on any stories it publishes in the future.
One minor point that jumped out at me in the story. The “victim” of the gang rape claimed that a year or more later she was again physically assaulted by a guy throwing a bottle at her which broke on her face.
A couple of days later she is described as meeting with the Dean with a livid bruise on her face.
Question: How fast does a bottle have to be traveling before it will break on someone’s face? Not skull, face, which has a good it of padding that absorbs impact. This means the bottle has to be going much faster to actually break.
Question: Is it possible for a bottle to break on someone’s face and they wind up with only a bruise, not broken bones or massive lacerations?
I don’t think so. I’d just a few days before seen a Mythbusters episode on beer bottles and heads. You simply do not break a bottle on someone with doing a lot more damage than a bruise. This detail of the story came from someone who was not hit with a breaking bottle, but from someone who’d seen this happen only in movies.
http://www.discovery.com/tv-shows/mythbusters/mythbusters-database/hit-with-beer-bottle/
Bottle breaking in movies has always bothered me, it seems like breaking a bottle on someone’s face would be extremely difficult, or a freak happening.
When I was a kid some teens threw a 6 ounce coke bottle at my face as they drove by at about 35 mph, it missed me, but I knew that the damage would have been far worse than knew, perhaps even fatal, but I have never thought that the bottle would have broke.
And just how does being a Jew fit into your list of aspersions.
I understand the implications of the other terms just fine.
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You can find videos on Youtube of idiot guys breaking empty beer bottles on their own skulls.
Different from the claim in the article in at least two ways.
Skull is not face. Though come to think of it, hair might provide as much paddings as the additional flesh on the face.
Arm and bottle have a lot more mass and inertia than bottle alone. Which means the flying bottle would need to hit at much greater speed to break.
Might want to change the title?
Rolling Stones is a trademarked name of a rock band.
Rolling Stone is the name of a liberal rag.
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