Paul Farhi, a "Media Reporter" for the Washington Post, sought to characterize Ms. Erdely, Jackie and Rolling Stone as worse than voyeurs.
These are pictures of parts of a July 4, 2016 article by Mr. Farhi. The noncontiguous pictures are separated by a line:
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The article is called "Gay Talese and Rolling Stone trusted their sources. Then we lost trust in them."
We did? Is Mr. Farhi suggesting that a lot of people trust reporters who are fascinated by voyeurs and voyeurism, and who also commit the crime of voyeurism with their sources? Is he suggesting that the only reason that anyone should have stopped trusting Mr. Talese was that the voyeur who was Mr. Talese's source might have lied about something and Mr. Talese didn't get other people to corroborate everything that the source said?
The New Yorker published an excerpt from Mr. Talese's book on April 11, 2016. These are pictures of the first paragraph of it:
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These are also pictures of part of the excerpt:
Mr. Talese's source was "unwilling to concede" that he was doing anything wrong or hurting anyone, even though he was afraid of getting caught and going to jail. "There's no invasion of privacy if no one complains." Is that like saying there's no rape if nobody hears the victim scream? What about rape victims who are drugged so they can't fight back, don't know what happened and can't tell anyone?
What about the media's bias against rape victims that makes them too afraid to talk about what happened to them?
Those aren't the "red flags" that Mr. Farhi is worried about:
That's another picture of Mr. Farhi's July 4, 2016 article.
There's nothing in the entire article by Mr. Farhi that says or even implies that voyeurism is a crime. There's also nothing in the article that acknowledges that Ms. Erdely was trying to help victims of sexual crime and that Mr. Talese is a sexual criminal who wrote a lurid book because he wanted to and who couldn't care less about victims of sexual crime. To write about Ms. Erdely and Mr. Talese in the same article as if they are like each other is ludicrous; to suggest that Ms. Erdely's article is worse for society than Mr. Talese's book is an obscenity.
This is also a picture of part of the excerpt from Mr. Talese's book:
Was Mr. Talese sure that "families" didn't get watched by the motel owner and the motel owner's wife? Did it occur to him that Mr. Talese was told that because his source didn't want to be arrested for spying on children or minors?
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These are also pictures of part of the excerpt;
"Carelessness." If "carelessness" isn't everyone's biggest pet peeve with everyone else in the world, what is?
The answer to Mr. Talese's question about whether Mr. Talese "had become complicit" is yes, he had, and so has everyone else who has known about Mr. Talese's book and who has treated it as if the only thing wrong with it is that Mr. Talese didn't verify everything about it. It seems to me that Mr. Talese verified as much of it as he wanted to verify.
Mr. Farhi wrote a number of articles about the Rolling Stone article. One of them was published on December 5, 2014. It was called "How Rolling Stone failed in its story of alleged rape at the University of Virginia." He started that article by saying "Journalists are paid to be skeptical and to distingush facts from assertions," and although he and Mr. Shapiro were intimidating Ms. Erdely and Rolling Stone into retracting the Rolling Stone article when Mr. Farhi wrote his definition of what a paid journalist is supposed to do, I have never read anything by the Post that suggests that Mr. Shapiro should have apologized for the way he wrote on January 8, 2016 about the texts between Ryan and Jackie or for any of the other mistakes that the Post has made, or for the way that every aspersion cast upon the Rolling Stone article by the Post has been repeated by every other media source that has followed the Post's lead to discredit the article, ruin Jackie's life, ruin Ms. Erdely's career and turn Rolling Stone into a trembling heap.
On January 11, 2016, 3 days after Mr. Shapiro's article, the Post published another article by Mr. Farhi, called "Jackie's rape story was false. So why hasn't the media named her by now?"
There are media sources who are doing that to Jackie; they're all calling her a liar.
Copyright, with noted exceptions, L. Kochman, October 22, 2016 @ 8:53 p.m.