Wow, what a non-apology apology. First, they blame "Jackie" for lying, calling her "a really expert fabulist storyteller" - fooled the whole crack team at Rolling Stone!
Next, they say they were just too darned deferential to Jackie because, golly, they just want to protect rape victims!
Rolling Stone’s fundamental mistake, Mr. Dana said, was in suspending any skepticism about Jackie’s account because of the sensitivity of the issue. “We didn’t think through all the implications of the decisions that we made while reporting the story, and we never sort of allowed for the fact that maybe the story we were being told was not true,” he said. That was compounded by the fact that any reporting on any purported crime that has not been reported to the authorities is difficult, he said.
“Ultimately, we were too deferential to our rape victim,” Mr. Woods, the article’s editor, said in the report. “We honored too many of her requests in our reporting. We should have been much tougher, and in not doing that, we maybe did her a disservice.”
Ms. Erdely, Mr. Wenner said, “was willing to go too far in her effort to try and protect a victim of apparently a horrible crime. She dropped her journalistic training, scruples and rules and convinced Sean to do the same. There is this series of falling dominoes.”
And ultimately, Rolling Stone has decided that the "journalist" and editor responsible for this libel will keep their jobs. How brave of them.
