Situation Definition
A journalist’s job is to seek news and report on it. It is our job to inform the public, and to do that we need to gather the facts and make sure they are accurate and reliable. Rolling Stones magazine failed to do that in their 2014 article, “A Rape on Campus” written by Sabrina Erdely. The story was about an alleged gang rape at a frat at the University of Virginia. Six months later, the story was retracted in its entirety after other journalists found discrepancies in the claims made in the article.
The article claimed that a student, referred to as “Jackie” in the article was taken to a party at Phi Kappa Psi, where she was raped later that night by several of the fraternity members as part of an initiation. Once other news sources began to point out the inaccuracies in the story, Rolling Stone sent out several apologies. After investigations, several media outlets believed that “Jackie” created her story to win the affection of another student, while some believed it was related to PTSD.
Analysis
According to the SPJ Code of Ethics, the foundations of ethical journalism are to seek truth and report it, minimize harm, act independently, and be accountable and transparent. In some way or another, Erdely did not follow these journalistic principles when writing her article.
She did not seek truth before reporting on this situation. The author and editors of Rolling Stone were too occupied with accommodating this supposed sexual assault victim, that they did not proceed to check to see how reliable her story was. While journalists are supposed to keep sexual assault and rape victims anonymous, which is what Erdely did, it is more important to check the credibility of the source first.
While the author did her best to minimize harm for the victim and the people that “Jackie” accused of committing the crime by using fake names, this reduced the credibility of her article. “The published story glossed over the gaps in the magazine’s reporting by using pseudonyms and by failing to state where important information had come from” (iMediaEthics). It seems that the only “facts” of the story were that the event happened at Phi Kappa Psi at the University of Virginia.
In order to act independently, although “Jackie” may have seemed to have a story worth writing an article about, that does not mean the author does not have to do any fact-checking of her own. “Jackie” can be used as a source but if she is choosing to be anonymous to the audience, Erdely should have made sure that the victim was not being untruthful.
And lastly, “ethical journalism means taking responsibility for one’s work and explaining one’s decisions to the public”, according to the SPJ Code of Ethics. Once Rolling Stone realized the mistake that they had made, they removed their article. The editors as well as Ederly all apologized to the Rolling Stone audience for not providing their best work. They accepted their mistakes and told their readers what they did versus what they should have done.
Conclusion
In the end, I believe that Rolling Stone handled their apologies in a professional manner. They recognized their mistakes and made corrections to keep it from happening again. After this whole process I would hope that the editors and reporters learned the importance of fact-checking. The Columbia Journalism Review called the story “this year’s [2014] media-fail sweepstakes”, while the Poynter Institute named the story as the “Error of the Year” in journalism. Several lawsuits stemmed from this single story, and Rolling Stone is still trying to recover from this incident.
References
Purvis, H. (2015). ANONYMOUS SOURCES: More or less and why and where?. Southwestern Mass Communication Journal, 30(2), 2-21.
Smith, S. (2017, September 13). Rolling Stone UVA Rape Report out; ‘A Story of Journalistic Failure,’ Columbia J School concludes. Retrieved November 15, 2017, from https://www.imediaethics.org/rolling-stone-uva-rape-report-out-a-story-of-journalistic- failure-columbia-j-school-concludes/
Uberti, David (December 22, 2014). “The worst journalism of 2014”. Columbia Journalism Review. Retrieved November 15, 2017.
A Rape on Campus. (2017, November 05). Retrieved November 15, 2017, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Rape_on_Campus
SPJ Code of Ethics – Society of Professional Journalists. (n.d.). Retrieved November 15, 2017, from https://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp
Poynter.org – “The year in media errors and corrections 2014”. Retrieved November 15, 2017