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.
Everything bad is right-wing, because right-wing is a synonym for bad. We never make mistakes on the Left. http://t.co/8kNB7BuDJr
— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) April 6, 2015
We have reached PEAK HOT TAKE. Please STAND AWAY FROM THE TAKE. pic.twitter.com/LYdmk0Dzc4
— daveweigel (@daveweigel) April 6, 2015
I hope liberals are criticizing this piece too, because it is completely absurd. http://t.co/VB6MIZ2RED
— Jon Lovett (@jonlovett) April 6, 2015
This is nonsense. Seizing on anecdotes to misleadingly push a broader narrative is hardly exclusive to the right. http://t.co/ynnjJmHMxS
— Radley Balko (@radleybalko) April 6, 2015
Wow. Horror-story journalism is an invention of the right-wing, says 24 year-old know-nothing. http://t.co/jzmddGckEZ
— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) April 6, 2015