Rieder: Lessons of 'Rolling Stone' debacle

Discussing his school's devastating report on Rolling Stone's terribly botched story on an alleged gang rape, Steve Coll, dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, said Monday that one of the inquiry's objectives was to serve as a teaching moment.

Well, there's plenty to learn from this sorry episode.

The most basic lesson, of course, has been obvious since The Washington Post and other news outlets began to pick the Rolling Stone story apart late last year. And that's that you don't go with a story until you have it nailed down. The reporting lapses highlighted in great detail by the Columbia report, of which Coll was a co-author, are harrowing. The most elementary procedures for confirming information were blatantly ignored.

And that's squarely on the editors of Rolling Stone. Yes, reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely is to blame for a shockingly deficient story. And yes, Jackie, the alleged victim who was the fulcrum of the story, was hardly an ideal source.

But the buck stops with the leadership of the magazine.

That is why the "what, me worry?" response from Rolling Stone to the report's powerful findings is as infuriating as it is confounding. It's all about people and process. And if the same people remain in place and the editing and fact-checking procedures remain unchanged, what makes Publisher and co-founder Jann Wenner, not to mention all the rest of us, think there won't be a repeat performance?

It's clear from, among other things, the number of questions on the subject at Columbia's Monday press conference on the report that there's widespread puzzlement about Wenner's vow that no one will lose a job and Managing Editor Will Dana's declaration that the editing structure doesn't need to be addressed. Hopefully Wenner will come to his senses.

Listen in as Rem Rieder weighs in on USA TODAY's media ethics discussion about Columbia's report and its impact.

There are other valuable lessons to be learned from the report, about failings that contributed to the overarching failure to confirm information. There was some good discussion of those lessons at the press conference held by Coll and Sheila Coronel, the Columbia J-school's dean of academic affairs.

•Beware of confirmation bias. Clearly Erdely had a predisposition to believe Jackie's horror story. Erdely wanted to do a powerful piece on the problem of campus rape. Nothing wrong with that. But her sympathy for both the alleged victim and the cause impelled her to embrace conclusions before she knew enough to form them. The same lack of skepticism helped paralyze the Rolling Stone editing and fact-checking processes.

•Attribution is key. Narrative journalism can be a beautiful thing. Telling a compelling individual story to make a broader point is one of the truly valuable weapons in the journalistic arsenal. But like many big guns, it needs to be wielded carefully. Too often the problems crop up over attribution. Many narratives are written as if by an all-knowing narrator. I once worked with a talented author who hated it when I insisted on attribution. The writer felt it hurt the flow.

But there's a good reason for attributing information, and sometimes the flow has to be hurt. That's especially true when something is totally one-sided, as was the case with Jackie's three friends, who are portrayed in a very unsympathetic fashion. Turns out the account was based only on Jackie's word. The author hadn't talked to the friends. And that wasn't disclosed to the readers. Which leads to another lesson:

•Transparency is critical. Acknowledging what you don't know isn't a sign of weakness. It can help credibility. And if the passage suggests maybe there's too much you don't know, that's a sign you need to do more reporting.

•Basing a big, big story on a single source is an invitation to disaster. And that's true even when the source isn't as shaky as Jackie.

One more thing: Rolling Stone obviously was right to fully retract the story, but it made a big mistake when it removed the piece from its website. You can't just pretend it never happened. It needs to live, with corrective comments, of course, as a cautionary tale about the steep price of shoddy journalism.