Tim Dickinson covers the National Affairs beat for Rolling Stone. But today he’s succumbed to the vortex of Twitter and is vehemently defending his magazine’s rape coverage concerning a young woman at the University of Virginia that has whipped up a ton of controversy. The big problem: The story addresses and focuses nearly entirely on the alleged victim and not the perpetrators. The only name of a perpetrator that emerges is “Drew.”
Dickinson assures that he’s just offering opinions on Twitter as himself. Presumably he’s trying to solidly clarify that he’s not handling PR for the magazine that ran the story by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, who’s getting nearly as much press attention as UVA. Perhaps he should explain what his retweets mean as well?
Dickinson explains who he is and even shares his name, in case people get distracted and forget what feed they’re reading.
“1) I’m writing here just as me, Tim Dickinson. I did not have any editorial intersection with the UVA piece. But I’m appalled that people are turning a story about a public institution sitting on an explosive allegation of gang rape on campus into a conversation about ethics in gang-rape journalism.”
The Rolling Stone writer gamely points to other pubs that have not interviewed alleged perps in their rape stories. For example, there’s the NYT. “When the NYT wrote an expose of college rape it made no evident effort to interview the alleged serial perp,” he wrote. He linked to a story about college women who had allegedly been raped but had never come forward by name.
After Slate suggested that “Jackie” may need to be defended in court, Dickinson surmised, “What these folks are really asking for is for the story to be made into a she said/he said that they can ignore.”
Could it be that some journalists want to practice traditional journalism and examine all sides of a story before taking it upon themselves to declare that UVA’s got a gang rape problem? Anyone remember the Duke Lacrosse team? That turned out to be a false accusation of rape by a black stripper against three white lacrosse players.
The Federalist‘s editor Sean Davis asks Dickinson, “How is what your mag is doing — outright refusing to turn the perps in to law enforcement — any different than what UVA did?”
In another instance in the last 13 hours, Dickinson slammed Slate again, asking, “Respectfully, did Slate try to get in touch with the other alleged rapist featured here?” He links to a story by sex writer Amanda Hess about a few lawsuits involving rape at Georgia Tech.
And how about WaPo? They also didn’t interview the alleged perp.
On Tuesday afternoon in his unofficial layman’s defense of his mag, he asks, “Is there some categorical distinction I’m missing between an alleged serial [anal] rapist and a single case of gang rape? Or, in fact, is it unusual for journalists in cases of unadjudicated claims of college rape to track down and confront alleged perps?”
The Rolling Stone reporter had a powerfully scary pronouncement: “Rape culture is powerful insidious shit.”
He also knows some insidious shit is coming his way.
“Aaaand here come the trolls,” he wrote.