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New Republic Gets The Award For Dumbest Reaction To Fake Rolling Stone Story

Alex Griswold Media Reporter
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Why did Rolling Stone and freelance reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely so massively screw up their story falsely accusing a University of Virginia frat of gang-raping a freshman girl? Well if you work for liberal magazine The New Republic, the answer is that they were too right-wing.

Yes, really. “Rolling Stone’s Rape Article Failed Because It Used Rightwing [sic] Tactics to Make a Leftist Point,” blares the headline of the piece, written by staff reporter Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig.

What exactly were the “right-wing tactics” used by Rolling Stone, according to Bruenig? Apparently, focusing on individual cases is something that only conservatives do, while liberals focus on systematic injustices. (RELATED: New Republic: Obamacare Debate Among ‘Most Transparent In Recent Memory’)

“Pinning an indictment of a system on the story of an individual is essentially a rightwing [sic] tactic with a dodgy success rate,” Bruenig writes. “It’s a way of using an individual as a metonym for systematic analysis that [liberal arts major technobabble].”

To reiterate, Bruenig believes that the movement that DIDN’T advance the stories of Duke Lacrosse, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Sandra Fluke, Matthew Shepard, Tawana Brawley, Cindy Sheehan, Memories Pizza, Emma Sulkowicz, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and Anita Hill is the one that focuses on using individual’s stories to advance a political cause.

Twitter reacted with the ridicule the article so richly deserved.

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