Rolling Stone Can Take Their Defamation Statement And Shove It, by Mollie Hemmingway.

Within moments of a jury returning a verdict that Rolling Stone, publisher Jann Wenner’s company, and reporter Sabrina R. Erdely acted with malice to defame a University of Virginia administrator, the magazine sent out a statement trying to save face. Here it is, with my comments:

“When we published ‘A Rape on Campus’ in 2014, we were attempting to tackle the very serious and complex topic of sexual assault on college campuses, a subject that is more relevant today than ever.”

No. When Rolling Stone published “A Rape on Campus” in 2014, it was attempting to drive a sketchy narrative for progressive political results. That’s what Sabrina Erdely has done with many of her pieces over her career. That’s why Rolling Stone hired her. They took a very serious issue of how the sexual revolution has led to all sorts of abuses on college campuses and decided instead to focus on the dubious “rape culture” message pushed in recent years by progressive activists. Abuses on college campuses — and especially off college campuses — are real, but the recent “rape culture” craze has led to attacks on the civil liberties of men and created a panic built on emotion more than reality.

“In our desire to present this complicated issue from the perspective of a survivor, we overlooked reporting paths and made journalistic mistakes that we are committed to never making again.”

This is both an incredible understatement and a misdirection. Erdely smeared someone and failed to do obvious due diligence with her sources. At every step of the fact-checking process, the magazine failed. The publication didn’t just fail to do its job, its staff didn’t seem to want to, putting a blockbuster story over basic journalism practices.

Nowadays Rolling Stone is nothing more than a far-left rag for aging hippies who sold out. They manufactured a story for political and financial gain, smearing and damaging innocents in the process.