Falsely accusing an entire fraternity of a rape orgy is so five years ago.
Rolling Stone is now trying to top that folly with a lengthy lamentation that the mainsteam media got upset over left-wing antifa thugs beating up a journalist.
The formerly respected music magazine published some thousand-plus words about Portland-based journalist Andy Ngo, who recently left his editorial job at Quillette following his beating-induced brain bleed. Reporter E.J. Dickson derides Ngo, who has contributed commentary to mainstream outlets ranging from the Wall Street Journal to the New York Post and boots-on-the-ground reporting on the increasingly violent episodes in Portland for years, as a “right-wing troll,” “provocateur,” and “social media personality.”
But his primary crime, according to the Rolling Stone, isn’t objectively documenting violence from antifa. It’s getting the rest of the media to care about it:
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Immediately, he metamorphosed from being just another right-wing troll scrambling for attention to a blank slate, a canvas onto which political figures and journalists of all stripes could project their goals and desires. For those on the right, condemning the boogeyman of antifa was a no-brainer, an easy and convenient way to score points with the base; for those on the left, it was an opportunity to telegraph being fair, rational, and level-headed, while simultaneously taking a few steps away from their black-clad brethren further left. And for members of the media, the industry to which Ngo ostensibly belonged, it was an opportunity to demonstrate, in the face of constant and unrelenting allegations of liberal bias, just how unbiased they could be.
There’s nothing overtly defamatory about this piece, though Dickson does promulgate the debunked notion that Ngo was in some sort of cladestine cahoots with Patriot Prayer, a far-right group that actually does intentionally instigate violent conflicts with antifa.
So, at the very least, Rolling Stone won’t have to pay up another $1.65 million, as they had to after their defamatory and fully retracted 2014 rape story, or the additional settlement they reached with a falsely maligned university administrator. But in a way, their diatribe against Ngo is more dangerous.
“A Rape on Campus” was quickly debunked by ample exculpatory evidence, but the only malice contributing to its existence was one vicious liar who told the story, a bad journalist dumb enough to believe her, and negligent editors likely fueled by their prior beliefs that such a grotesque and logistically unfeasible attack could happen in the first place. But this hit piece on Ngo is straight commentary, not reporting. Yet the journalist who wrote it is actively calling for other journalists, like those at CNN who rightly covered the story, to ignore acts of violence committed against reporters simply for doing their jobs in covering a violent domestic group.
Anyone familiar with Ngo’s work knows he — an atheist, gay person of color and son of immigrants — has a safely center-right viewpoint. Until the Antifa attack, Ngo’s most controversial work centered around his reporting and commentary centered on multiculturalism and integrating into liberal societies. Even then, the most bombastic thing he had to correct was a line-item retraction of a single detail in a Wall Street Journal story. Contrary to the fact-free fervor attempting to smear Ngo as provoking Antifa, he acted as nothing other than a reporter, reporting on them, which they of course hated.
If fellow journalists won’t even stand up for Ngo’s right to do his job and cover a story without the threat of violence, who will? And who can balk when President Trump calls the media the enemy of the people, if the media won’t even defend itself?
