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.
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/