Rolling Stone Can't Even Apologize Right

No, the magazine has pretty much botched everything about this clusterf-k of a story.

From Megan McArdle, at Bloomberg:

Rolling Stone got taken by a fabulist.

Sunday night, the Columbia Journalism Review released its exhaustive report on what went wrong with the magazine's blockbuster story about an alleged gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity that turned out to be substantially false. And we learned what Rolling Stone plans to do to prevent such mistakes in the future, which is to say basically nothing.

No one is getting fired. Jann Wenner, the magazine's owner, expects that Sabrina Rubin Erdely, the author of the article in question, will continue to write for them. Her apology, also released last night, says in part: "I allowed my concern for Jackie’s well-being, my fear of re-traumatizing her, and my confidence in her credibility to take the place of more questioning and more facts. These are mistakes I will not make again." So everyone is basically saying the same thing: Their compassion for rape victims allowed them to be taken by a liar. Big oops, won't do that again! Nothing to see here, so can we all move along?

It's not that this version is wrong -- I think at this point we can stop dancing around the fact that "Jackie" is a fabulist. The Rolling Stone report adds some detail to this, including the suggestion that the two additional alleged victims of gang rapes at Phi Kappa Psi were also creations of Jackie's imagination. But dealing with fabulists isn't some kind of rare hazard that journalists can't be expected to anticipate. People lie to journalists all the time, for fun and profit. They tell self-serving lies designed to get them out of trouble, or self-aggrandizing lies designed to puff themselves up. They tell lies of kindness to shield others from shame or worse, and lies designed to hurt people they hate. They also tell bizarre lies about things that bring them no benefit at all, for reasons that a psychologist might be able to explain but I cannot. And unfortunately, reporters get taken.

But while it is not wrong, it is also not enough. Usually, when a reporter gets taken, you will hear some combination of the following...

More.