Rolling Stone magazine did everything wrong in 2015 when it published A Rape on Campus, a since-retracted 8,985-word fabrication alleging a brutal assault at the University of Virginia.
Two years and three libel lawsuits later, the 50-year-old magazine is now looking for a buyer, according to the New York Times.
Founder Jann S. Wenner “is putting his company’s controlling stake in Rolling Stone up for sale, relinquishing his hold on a publication he has led since its founding,” the Times reported.
Quite a development for a magazine that Wenner once claimed could’ve sold for as much as $500 million. He’ll be lucky if he gets even a small percentage of that today. Wenner’s 27-year-old son, Gus, is the man behind the plan. As it turns out, Rolling Stone is simply the latest family asset to get the heave-ho.
“The Wenners recently sold the company’s other two magazines, Us Weekly and Men’s Journal. And last year, they sold a 49 percent stake in Rolling Stone to BandLab Technologies, a music technology company based in Singapore,” the Times reported.
Though the Times doesn’t give short-shrift to the UVA debacle that preceded Rolling Stone’s looming sale, the paper nevertheless deploys some curious language to describe the magazine’s hoax fiasco. To wit, the Times twice refers to the since-retracted Rolling Stone UVA report as “botched.”
That’s a charitable characterization — a bit like claiming Stephen Glass or the Times’ own Jayson Blair were fired for “botched” stories, when in fact they just made everything up.
The UVA story’s supposed victim, a troubled woman known only as “Jackie,” appears to have invented her tale from thin air in a bizarre, cruel, and vain bid for the attention of a young male student she had been pursuing. And the story’s author was a more than willing mark. Sabrina Rubin Erdely acted more as stenographer than journalist, eagerly repeating “Jackie’s” most shocking allegations without even basic fact-checking or an ounce of scrutiny.
As it turned out, there was never any assault. Her alleged primary assailant “Haven Monahan” never existed in the first place. The fraternity event to which he supposedly took her, where she was supposedly ritually abused by a gang of frat boys, had not occurred at all.
Rolling Stone’s masthead editors bear a great deal of responsibility for the spread of this hoax. The editors were lazy, and they published Erdely’s work without performing the sort of thorough fact-checking one would expect from a professional news organization.
The report fell apart soon after it was published, and Rolling Stone was faced with a humiliating disaster.
“[W]e are officially retracting ‘A Rape on Campus,'” managing editor Will Dana announced after the story had imploded. “We are also committing ourselves to a series of recommendations about journalistic practices that are spelled out in the report.”
“We would like to apologize to our readers and to all of those who were damaged by our story and the ensuing fallout, including members of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity and UVA administrators and students,” he added.
Humiliation wasn’t the end of it for the infamously left-leaning magazine. Rolling Stone soon found itself on the receiving end of three costly libel lawsuits. One such lawsuit ended last year with the jury awarding the plaintiff $3 million in damages.
The New York Times isn’t wrong to suggest the current state of media, and the industry’s shift towards online and video, has played a large role in Rolling Stone’s financial woes. But let’s not underestimate the role that the magazine’s costly and inexcusable A Rape on Campus also played in its current state of affairs.
At a loss of reputation, journalistic credibility and $3 million, Erdely’s love note to fabulism was certainly more than just a “botched” report.
