re: #131 Backwoods_Sleuth

Putting on my more than 30 years as a professional journalist hat here, RS totally screwed up with this.

There is NO FECKING WAY I would have ever allowed an article to be anywhere near as completely unvetted as that one was.

Please note that I am NOT saying that “Jackie” lied or was making stuff up, but right off the bat with her setting the conditions of no names for something purporting to be “investigative reporting” put every potential liability on RS.

I absolutely understand why she didn’t want her name out there. I read the RS statement and RS put the onus right back on “Jackie.” On top of that, this woman’s name would have been dragged through the mud from here to Kingdom Come by the Fraternity Industrial Complex.

Most of my work in the last 20 years has been as a copy editor, which means I want to know EVERY source for a story. Even if we’re not publishing that information, I want to make sure that I, as an editor, and my organization, that has a reputation for accuracy, are on exceedingly solid ground before a single word sees the light of day.

We may have anonymous sources in a published story, but I damned sure know who that anonymous source is and have verified ALL of the information we are printing as fact.

Guess I’m just too old school…

Just a question: Does that include going and getting some sort of quote or denial from the person presumably identified as the rapist, even if the information isn’t published? “Some people” seem to think RS’s screwup included not going to the horse’s mouth.

That said, I went to the University of Texas at Austin in the early 1980s and it had a “vibrant” Greek culture. (My bias: I joined a co-op after my first year there and we were none too tolerant of frat boys, but we’d happily take their money when they came to our amazing parties.) And yeah, we heard stuff…women AND men getting sexually assaulted by members of fraternities. And not just sexual assault, there were the usual alcohol poisoning incidents involving pledges and frat members, along with the related injuries and deaths. (I won’t even touch the racism which is still very apparent if you peruse the pledge classes of the top-shelf frats and sororities even today.) So “Greek culture,” IMHO, has been problematic to me for a very long time, and IMHO, was problematic for a long time before I ever heard of UT-Austin.