L STANDS FOR LOATHSOME LIBERAL LIARS

At Rolling Stone, "journalistic integrity" is an oxymoron.

That’s the upshot of the magazine’s response to a 12,000 word report issued Monday (4/06) on the bogus story Rolling Stone published last November, which claimed a fraternity at the University of Virginia used gang rape as an initiation rite.

The story was based on the unverified word of "Jackie," who claimed she was raped during a party for pledges at the Phi Kappa Psi house the night of Sept. 28, 2012.

It wasn’t until she was wrapping up her story that author Sabrina Erdely sent this email to chapter president Stephen Scipione:

"I’ve become aware of allegations of gang rape that have been made against the UVA chapter of Phi Kappa Psi," Ms. Erdely wrote. "Can you comment on those allegations?"

This was "a decidedly truncated version of the facts that Erdely believed she had in hand," noted the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University and two associates in their report.

Mr. Scipione answered vaguely because Erdely hadn’t provided enough detail for the fraternity to respond properly.

"It was complete BS," Mr. Scipione told investigators. ""They weren’t telling me what they were going to write about. They weren’t telling me any dates or details."

Had Ms. Erdely provided the details she possessed, the fraternity would have been able to investigate the charges, as it did after the story was published. Ms. Erdely chose to interpret the necessarily vague response to her  "request for comment" as an indication Phi Kappa Psi was "hiding something."

If Ms. Erdely or Rolling Stone had themselves checked the key details of Jackie’s story, they’d have learned before publication there was no party at the Phi Kappa Psi house the night the rape allegedly occurred; that the fraternity rushes in the Spring.

And if she or the magazine’s fact checkers had contacted the three friends Jackie said would back up her story, they’d have learned her friends didn’t, as the Washington Post found out when it talked to them after the story was published.

Warning signs were ignored because Ms. Erdely wanted to write, and her editors wanted to print, a story supporting the narrative white fraternity boys are responsible for an "epidemic" of sexual assaults on college campuses.

About 7 college age women in 1,000 are victims of sexual assault, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. That’s 0.7 percent, not 20 percent as many feminists claim. Young women who don’t go to college are about 20 percent more likely to be raped than coeds are. The incidence of rape on and off campus has declined by about 50 percent in the last two decades.

The Columbia report provides exhaustive detail about how the bogus story made it into print, but devotes just a single paragraph as to why. That’s because the report’s authors also push the false narrative.

Neither Ms. Erdely nor her editors have expressed a word of contrition to the frat boys they smeared. They’re sorry they got caught, not sorry for what they did.

The Rolling Stone story is now the most well documented example of agenda journalism, and "confirmation bias."

But it isn’t the worst. That would be the "Hands Up, Don’t Shoot" myth about the police shooting in Ferguson, Mo., eagerly promoted by many journalists despite the paucity of evidence for it.

The hysterical, hypocritical, fact free assault on Indiana’s law to protect religious freedom is a close second.

No one at Rolling Stone will be disciplined, said publisher Jann Wenner. When there are no consequences for bad behavior, that’s a sure fire guarantee it will be repeated.

If there’s to be justice for their victims, it’ll have to come from the courts.

"If I was that fraternity, I’d have a lot of big legal offices on my speed dial and I would just be teeing them up," Tobe Berkovitz, a media expert at Boston University, told the Boston Herald.

By all means sue, Phi Kappa Psi. If the liars aren’t made to pay a stiff price, they’ll keep on lying.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

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