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Media Critique: Rolling Stones Article


Media Critique: Rolling Stones Article

By Piper Shiflet



Journalism has been a hard job to have throughout history, because many of the rules/expectations have remained the same. Journalists must not let their own opinions take over while writing, and being unbiased is one of the most important things to become a stronger journalist. But in general, there are many rules that are broken often, like taking sides, plagiarizing fellow journalists' work and disrespecting their audiences beliefs. This is why most journalists walk on nails and do the right thing, they tell straight facts instead of their own opinions.
The New York Times response to the Rolling Stones article, "A Rape on Campus," that was published in 2014 (by no means a recent article) about the false rape case that happened at the University of Virginia, a female by the name Jackie accused a fraternity of raping her. This had already been removed by 2015, as stated by The New York Times, "The article, "A Rape on Campus," was retracted in April 2015 after a Columbia Journalism School report that said the magazine failed to take the basic journalistic steps to verify the account of a woman, identified only by Jackie." They later even explain that, "it was an embarrassing episode for a magazine that has long prided itself on its journalistic accomplishments."
The original article has been retracted, but it is well explained in the response and you can tell that the writers of, "A Rape on Campus," had no evidence of whether this was real or fake news, which is a violation of verification. They didn't look into the details of this case and it was quite obvious, they didn't take in the fact that this "Jackie," had no evidence to prove she had come into some type of contact with the fraternity.
The New York Times also covers the lawsuit against the Rolling Stones where the innocent fraternity sues the magazine for 1.65 million dollars, and proceeded to donate a large amount of the funds to, "groups that offer sexual assault awareness education, prevention training and victim counseling services on collage campuses."
To improve the original article, the journalists should have gone to more witnesses before publishing false information and putting a bad rep on the University of Virginia, as well as the fraternity, but overall the article is now taken down and in the past.

Sources:
Ember, Sydney. “Rolling Stone to Pay $1.65 Million to Fraternity Over Discredited Rape Story.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 13 June 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/06/13/business/media/rape-uva-rolling-stone-frat.html.

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