In September 1980, the Washington Post published an award-winning report, titled “Jimmy’s World,” that supposedly detailed the life of an eight-year-old heroin addict.
The story turned out to be 100 percent false, created entirely from journalist Janet Cooke’s imagination, and the Washington Post was forced to apologize for the then-Pulitzer Prize-winning story.
In November 2014, Rolling Stone magazine published a shocking exposé, titled “A Rape on Campus,” that detailed an alleged sexual assault that took place at University of Virginia fraternity.
Rolling Stone magazine has since disavowed the story written by Sabrina Rubin Ederly, telling its readers in a note on Friday that it now seriously doubts the credibility of the story’s reported victim, a UVA student identified only as Jackie.
Despite the age gap between Jimmy the Addict and Jackie the Victim, the two stories are remarkably similar.
First, both stories managed to survive scrutiny of fact checkers.
“How could she do it? I still don’t understand that,” then-Washington Post executive editor Benjamin Bradlee said in 2010 of the Cooke incident. “She was just one in a million.”
Asked at the time whether the Cooke fiasco and its fallout still haunted him, Bradlee said: “They do in my soul.”
Similarly, Rolling Stone managing editor Will Dana last week attempted to explain the magazine’s decision to publish the dubious UVA story.
“The fact that there is a story that appears in Rolling Stone in which I don’t have complete confidence is deeply unsettling to me,” Dana wrote in a series of tweets, presumably prompted by criticism directed at his original note on the issue. “We made a judgment — the kind of [judgment] reporters and editors make every day. And in this case, our [judgment] was wrong.”
“We should have either not made this agreement with Jackie,” he said, “or worked harder to convince her that the truth would have been better served by getting the other side of the story. That failure is on us — not on her.”
Second, prior to falling apart under intense scrutiny, Cooke’s and Ederly’s reports, one an outright fake and the other dubious in the extreme, managed to affect the public at large.
Cooke’s fabrications raised serious questions about drug use and poverty in the United States, winning her a Pulitzer Prize for her “efforts” and prompting a citywide law enforcement search in Washington, D.C., for the subject of her exposé.
However, after the search for Jimmy proved unsuccessful, doubts were raised about Cooke’s reporting, leading eventually to her being exposed as a fraud. The disgraced “reporter” returned her Pulitzer and resigned from the Washington Post.
Ederly’s reporting, though doubtful, initially won her glowing praise, her article turning a much-needed spotlight on campus sexual assault.
However, the story has since become more about Ederly, her source and Rolling Stone’s editorial standards, and less about campus sexual assault, bringing us to the third and final point.
Both Cooke and Ederly have harmed more than their respective publications and their reputations, according to critics.
In both instances, sloppy and false reporting can be blamed for collateral damage, Cooke making life more difficult for African-American journalists and Ederly likely making life a nightmare for victims of sexual assault.
“Because [Cooke] was black, innocent black journalists did penance for her sins,” Gayle Pollard-Terry wrote in 1996 for the National Association of Black Journalists’ NABJ Journal.
“In other newsrooms, some black reporters were asked if they were ‘Cooke-ing’ their quotes. Others were told to double-check their sources and make sure they weren’t ‘Cooke-ed.’ Many editors told black reporters that they didn’t trust them or their work. Those editors often called sources to double-check, which undermined the reporters,” Pollar-Terry said.
“In the wake of Cooke’s lies and the Post’s carelessness when hiring her, resumes were suddenly double-checked. References were grilled, at times even before the new job was offered. Transcripts were required from every academic institution attended decades after graduation,” she said.
Similarly, some critics contend that questions surrounding Ederly’s reporting will make life more difficult for women who have been assaulted, the Rolling Stone report will lead to unnecessary scrutiny.
“Rolling Stone played adjudicator, investigator and advocate — and did a slipshod job at that,” Emily Renda, the UVA activist who introduced Jackie to Ederly, said in a statement after Rolling Stone distanced itself from the report. “As a result, Jackie suffers, the young men in Phi Kappa Psi suffered, and survivors everywhere can unfairly be called into question.”
Rolling Stone, she said, “has run roughshod over years of advocacy, over fairness and justice, and ultimately over Jackie.”
Citing activist Susy Struble, Businessweek said “Rolling Stone’s note to readers — which fails to mention exactly what it now believes may be untrue — could discourage women from talking about violence.”
The Daily Beast’s Lizzie Crocker lamented that “in the case of Jackie and the University of Virginia, while journalists and pundits take positions based on what best suits their cause, the rest of us might never know what — if anything — happened to her that night in 2012.”
She finished with this somber note: “We only know that the story she originally told Rolling Stone was not entirely true — and, as a result, the issue of sexual assault on campuses is now even more warped.”
