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YES, IT WAS AN EPIC HOAX. Rolling Stone Campus Rape Hoax Turns Five: Lessons From The Journalism Scandal

November 19, 2019

Five years ago this month, Rolling Stone published what may arguably be its most famous article to date: “A Rape on Campus.” Written by veteran journalist Sabrina Rubin Erdely, the November 2014 article detailed a purported brutal gang rape on the grounds of the University of Virginia. The story immediately went viral and resulted in a swift suspension of all campus Greek life at UVA.

It was also a hoax.

Soon after its publication it was exposed as largely fiction, tarnishing Rolling Stone‘s reputation, discrediting Erdely, spawning several lawsuits that resulted in millions of dollars in damages, and generating a comprehensive forensic journalism analysis that revealed, in the words of one Rolling Stone editor, an “institutional failure” committed by “every single person at every level” of the story’s process. The effects of this journalistic fiasco are still felt half a decade later, and the entire saga is no less relevant today than it was in 2014.

thecollegefix-D. Payne

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THE FUTURE Is Female. And She’s Furious.

February 22, 2019

In October, a few days after Brett Kavanaugh was sworn in as a Supreme Court justice, The Washington Post published one woman’s account of channeling her rage into half an hour of screaming at her husband. “I announced that I hate all men and wish all men were dead,” wrote retired history professor Victoria Bissell Brown, entirely unapologetic despite conceding that her hapless spouse was “one of the good men.” While Brown’s piece was more clickbait than commentary, it was an extreme expression of a larger cultural moment. ‘Tis the season to be angry if you’re a woman in America—or so we’re told. The storm of sexual assault allegations that nearly derailed Kavanaugh’s confirmation was just the latest reported conflagration of female fury. But this decade’s wave of feminist anger had been building for several years before that. While the “female rage” narrative does not represent all or even most women, there is little doubt that it taps into real problems and real frustrations. The central theme of the call to feminist rage is sexual victimhood…In 1994, dissident feminist Christina Hoff Sommers published a controversial book, Who Stole Feminism?, that charged feminist activists and authors with using bogus facts and other “myth-information” to portray modern Western women as brutally oppressed. Much of this critique has held up.

In many ways, 20th century American feminism was one of liberal democracy’s great success stories. Overtly discriminatory laws and policies crumbled; cultural attitudes on a wide range of subjects underwent a dramatic shift.

Modern feminism, with its framework of male privilege and female oppression, takes a simplistic and one-sided view of gender dynamics in modern Western societies. It refuses to recognize that there is no perfect solution to the problem of dispensing justice when someone alleges a crime with no witnesses and both parties tell a credible story. Rage-driven activism can be particularly destructive when it targets and politicizes interpersonal relationships, an area in which the sexes are probably equal but different in bad behavior. Rage feminism is a path of fear and hate. It traps women in victimhood and bitterness. It demonizes men, even turning empathy for a male into a fault, and dismisses dissenting women as man-pleasing collaborators.

reason.com By Cathy Young

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CURRENT News, DoED, TitleIX, OCR, FALSE Accusers & Stats, HUNTING Ground DeBunked, MUST Reads /

ANDREA Pino Claims She’s a UNC Rape Victim. But Does Her Own Story Hold Up?

July 4, 2018

A case that helped jump-start a wave of campus sexual assault activism across America has ended in a big win for the UNC Chapel Hill complainants. Among those celebrating is former UNC student Andrea Pino, the co-founder of the national organization End Rape on Campus and the best-known of the five women behind the complaint. But her victory comes with an asterisk. While Andrea Pino’s role in the UNC complaint propelled her to national visibility, there are also serious questions, unanswered and largely unasked, about the credibility of her own story of sexual assault. The Campus Rape Frenzy, describes Pino’s complaint against UNC as “the highest-profile questionable Title IX claim.” While the authors stop short of calling Pino’s story a hoax, they note that it has startling parallels to that of Jackie, the faux victim in Rolling Stone‘s retracted story of a brutal fraternity rape at the University of Virginia…A TitleIX activist advocating for campus sexual assault survivors said this about Andrea Pino. “There have been some of us who have been frustrated for years by her web of lies.” Danielle*, who has interacted personally with Pino on a number of occasions, told me that she began to suspect her of being untruthful shortly after the Title IX complaint was filed. “I noticed that her ‘story’ became more and more graphic each time she told it to the press,” Danielle wrote. “She also loved being ‘in the limelight’ so much more than other survivors. And then other students began to tell me discrepancies in her story, such as the fact that the date she says it happened was when the dorms were closed for a break, so she could not have returned to her dorm room. Several students shared that her story was a ‘mash-up’ of three other students’ stories.” Danielle believes there is a “conspiracy of silence” that shields Pino’s credibility problems. “Many people in the movement are aware,” she wrote, “as well as some in the press whom I’ve spoken with.” She says that “there are powerful pressures to keep silent about potential hoaxers, and this hurts the movement in the long run.”

reason.com By Cathy Young

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Debunking The Hunting Ground

December 17, 2016

Let’s be clear. The Hunting Ground is propaganda, or as Ashe Schow writes, it is a propaganda film based on false statistics and inaccurate accounts of accusers. Here is a summary of THG in two sentences. One, that campus rape is “a highly calculated, premeditated crime,” committed by serial predators. And two, that schools typically do nothing when informed of a sex assault by repeat male student offenders. Many respected journalists debunk The Hunting Ground’s accuracy, let’s begin.

1. THG crew is caught editing Wikipedia in violation of the website’s conflict-of-interest guidelines. The crew edited Jameis Winston’s Wikipage who was cleared by three separate investigations but that fact got in the way of THG propaganda.

2.Variety’s Ella Taylor trashes “The Hunting Ground” as “shoddy journalism” and “a loaded piece of agitprop that plays fast and loose with statistics and our sympathy with victims of campus sexual assault.” Ella called THG one of the CRAPPIEST films of 2015.

3. A smoking gun email-exposed the bias of THG. An email, sent to Kinsman’s then-lawyer, included this assurance from THG producers, “We don’t operate the same way as journalists — this is a film project very much in the corner of advocacy for victims, so there would be no insensitive questions or the need to get the perpetrator’s side” This e-mail is directly contrary to claims by both the Producer and CNN — which calls itself “the most trusted name in news” — that this is an accurate, balanced documentary, fair to both sides of every story is an insult.

4. THG promotes advocacy not accuracy and because the stakes are so high, it is crucial, in telling stories of sexual assault, not to be blinded by advocacy, but to fairly examine the assertions of both sides. THG is a story that demonstrates how deeply the filmmakers’ politics colored their presentation of the facts—and how deeply flawed their influential film is as a result.

5. Harvard professors write a letter denouncing THG as propaganda. “We believe that Brandon Winston was subjected to a long, harmful ordeal for no good reason. Justice has been served in the end, but at enormous costs to this young man,” the professors wrote. “We denounce this film as prolonging his ordeal with its unfair and misleading portrayal of the facts of his case. Mr. Winston was finally vindicated by the Law School and by the judicial proceedings, and allowed to continue his career at the Law School and beyond. Propaganda should not be allowed to erase this just outcome.”

6.Defenders of Innocent Brandon Winston fight back with facts and documents. At the Brandon Project Facts Matter website, you can learn the truth. Read what viewers of THG should know.

7. Most important, THG relies upon David Lisak’s study to promote a campus serial predator theory. But it’s a funny thing, there is no direct connection to campus sexual assault in Lisak’s report. David Lisak is a fraud.

The Hunting Ground has seven deadly sins. Not from my mouth mind you, but from respected journalists who have the moral courage and intellect to review facts, seek out evidence and observe two sides to a story, two sides of a coin.

Courage is contagious, Alice True.

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