Rolling Stone magazine retracted a discredited story about an alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia after a devastating independent review by Columbia University deemed it a “journalistic failure that was avoidable.”
“The report was painful reading, to me personally and to all of us at Rolling Stone,” Will Dana, the magazine’s managing editor, said in an editor’s note appended to the outside review published on Rolling Stone’s website Sunday, and cross-published on the website of the Columbia Journalism Review magazine. “It is also, in its own way, a fascinating document — a piece of journalism … about a failure of journalism.”
By Sunday night, the original story had been replaced on Rolling Stone’s website with the Columbia Journalism Review report.