"The group’s musical cocktail of symphonic arrangements blended with horns and pop was met with particular contempt by Rolling Stone magazine..."

"... which tended to look askance at anything but unadulterated rock, the music historian John Covach said. Writing in the magazine in 1969, Jon Landau said, 'The listener responds to the illusion that he is hearing something new when in fact he is hearing mediocre rock, OK jazz, etc., thrown together in a contrived and purposeless way.'"

From "David Clayton-Thomas, Lead Singer of Blood, Sweat & Tears, Dies at 84/He was also the key lyricist of the Grammy-winning, genre-blending band, whose hits included 'Spinning Wheel,' 'And When I Die' and 'You’ve Made Me So Very Happy'" (NYT).

The headline gives the impression that Blood, Sweat & Tears wrote "And When I Die." In the 7th paragraph of the obituary, Laura Nyro is given proper credit. Save your "when I die" bons mots. Laura Nyro died 29 years ago. 

"On one side or the other — one side or the other is going to win. I don’t know. I mean, there can be a way of working — a way of living together peacefully..."

"... but it’s difficult, you know, because there are differences on fundamental things that really can’t be compromised. They really can’t be compromised. So it’s not like you are going to split the difference."

Said Justice Alito, quoted in "Justice Alito Caught on Tape Discussing How Battle for America 'Can’t Be Compromised'" (Rolling Stone). 

Alito made these remarks in conversation at the Supreme Court Historical Society’s annual dinner on June 3.... His comments were recorded by Lauren Windsor, a liberal documentary filmmaker.... She asked questions of the justice as though she were a religious conservative.... 

The recording... captures Windsor approaching Alito at the event and reminding him that they spoke at the same function the year before, when she asked him a question about political polarization. In the intervening year, she tells the justice, her views on the matter had changed. “I don’t know that we can negotiate with the left in the way that needs to happen for the polarization to end,” Windsor says. “I think that it’s a matter of, like, winning.”

Alito responded "I think you're probably right" and then said the lines quoted above. I consider his remarks anodyne. When people are ideologically polarized, they don't go in for compromises. They keep fighting. Just like Rolling Stone is keeping fighting with this article and its inflammatory headline. Alito doesn't use the word "battle" or say anything about a "Battle for America." He just responds to the instigator Windsor by observing that ideologues are not compromisers.

Alito talks about sides without putting himself on one of the sides. He doesn't join Windsor in the use of the pronoun "we." His words are neutral: "one side or the other," "there can be a way," "it’s difficult," "there are differences," "They" (meaning the "differences"). It must have been frustrating to Windsor. And yet, here's Rolling Stone serving them up as if Alito had declared himself a bitter ender battling for Christian Nationalism. Ludicrous!

"Other than this one key fact that the rape described actually was a fabrication of this woman, the rest of the story was bulletproof."

Said Jann Wenner, quoted in "Jann Wenner Defends His Legacy, and His Generation’s/The co-founder of Rolling Stone magazine on the legacy of boomers and why he chose only white men for his book on rock’s 'masters'" (NYT).

This is the interview that's been in the news — see "Jann Wenner’s Rock Hall Reign Lasted Years. It Ended in 20 Minutes. The day after the Rolling Stone co-founder made remarks widely criticized as racist and sexist in a Times interview, the Hall of Fame called an emergency vote and ousted him" — and that we've talked about already, but I'm calling attention to something I haven't seen discussed yet.

Here's the remark I've quoted in context. The interviewer, David Marchese, is in boldface. The rest is Wenner. I've put the above-quoted remark in red:

"In the interview, David Marchese of The Times asked Mr. Wenner, 77, why the book included no women or people of color."

"Regarding women, Mr. Wenner said, 'Just none of them were as articulate enough on this intellectual level,' and remarked that Joni Mitchell 'was not a philosopher of rock ’n’ roll.' His answer about artists of color was less direct. 'Of Black artists — you know, Stevie Wonder, genius, right?' he said. 'I suppose when you use a word as broad as "masters," the fault is using that word. Maybe Marvin Gaye, or Curtis Mayfield? I mean, they just didn’t articulate at that level.'"

From "Jann Wenner Removed From Rock Hall Board After Times Interview/The Rolling Stone co-founder’s exit comes a day after The New York Times published an interview in which he made widely criticized comments" (NYT).

Wenner's book, called "The Masters," collects various Rolling Stone interviews, and every single one is with a white male. Good and obvious choices like Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen, and Bono. But, come on, how could Wenner not have known he'd be challenged for omitting all women and all black musicians?!

Why wasn't he prepared with a response — and by that I mean an articulate response?

"Rolling Stone said Jan. 6 leaders used ‘burner’ phones" to communicate with top Trump officials. "Where’s the evidence?"

 Asks Eric Wemple (at WaPo).

“According to the three sources, some of the most crucial planning conversations between top rally organizers and Trump’s inner circle took place on those burner phones,” wrote investigative reporter Hunter Walker. The contacted associates included White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, Trump campaign consultant Katrina Pierson, and Eric and Lara Trump, the article alleged.... 

"Kevin McCarthy was well aware he was going to lose his bid to become Speaker of the House of Representatives on the first ballot, three people with knowledge of the situation told Rolling Stone."

"What he was not privately predicting was that the beatings would continue for an entire week. 'He knew he was going to get fucked — he just didn’t know they were going to fuck him this many times, or this hard,' explained one congressional aide."

Writes Asawin Suebsaeng in "Sex Trafficking Row Helped Fuel Gaetz’s Hatred for McCarthy" (Rolling Stone).

Literal sex (that may not have happened) and metaphorical sex (of the gang rape kind). 

Shall we read Rolling Stone?

"Running Rolling Stone required special skills. Mr. Wenner had to mold the copy into something readable after drug-fueled interviews..."

"... like the one he did with Jimi Hendrix. And he had to edit the work of [Hunter S.] Thompson, who loved his cocaine and whose office supplies included Wild Turkey and beer on tap, and an air horn. Mr. Thompson’s first dispatch from D.C., when he covered George McGovern’s 1972 campaign, began like this: 'I feel the fear coming on, and the only cure for that is to chew up a fat black wad of blood-opium about the size of a young meatball.'... Mr. Wenner recounts one day early in the magazine when Mick Jagger stopped by for blow and a long visit. On another, [Annie] Leibovitz dropped three large rocks of coke on his desk as 'a gift from Keith for you.' 'Cocaine had a stranglehold on the music business,' Mr. Wenner writes in the memoir. 'Drugs were the coin of the realm, enabling bad behavior, bad relationships, and lapses of judgment all around.' Dinner parties might have silver trays of neatly arranged lines of coke passed around every half-hour. When John Belushi fell off a stage doing his samurai skit and ended up in the hospital, with his leg in a cast suspended by wires, he mischievously pulled out a vial of coke hidden in the cast to show his friend Jann."

A snippet of the long article "Jann Wenner Wants to Reveal It All/The Rolling Stone founder talks about LSD, not reading the magazine anymore and how the Stones now look like 'Lord of the Rings' characters onstage" by Maureen Dowd (NYT).

The size of young meatball. Now, that was some choice writing. I suppose it was a young meatball the size of an old meatball. But who really cares about these old meatballs these days? They took a lot of drugs. It doesn't look glamorous from this old-meatball distance. The headline highlights the LSD, but I excerpted cocaine.

"When Dalton arrived, [Brian] Wilson was refusing to co-operate with the swarm of journalists surrounding him. 'He was sitting at the edge of the ocean, playing with the stones'...."

"To the dismay of the other photographers Dalton, an easygoing and charming Englishman, was able to break through to him and 'everything I asked him to do, he would do.'... Wilson.... invited Dalton to live with him and his girlfriend, Barbara. For years afterwards, every time they saw each other, Wilson would say: 'David, you always turn up just at the right time.' It was during this 'spooky' period, when Wilson was nearly always high and so paranoid that he slept with guns under his bed, that Dalton was first introduced to Charles Manson. Wilson was enamoured by the longhaired cult leader: he kept a bullet that Manson had given him on his mantlepiece and drove 120mph into the desert to tell Dalton that 'Charlie is cosmic'.... Dalton was also taken with him and, with his girlfriend Andy (whom he called his 'acid bride'), even went to stay on Manson’s Spahn ranch in Topanga Canyon for a time. There they rode horses in the moonlight and milled around with Manson and his 'family' of spellbound followers....."

From the London Times obituary for the rock journalist David Dalton, who has died at the age of 80.

Heres the award winning article he wrote in 1970: "Charles Manson: The Incredible Story of the Most Dangerous Man Alive/A chilling, deeply investigative look into the terrifying Manson family – including a jailhouse interview with Charlie himself." 

Sample text:

"Rolling Stone felt comparatively stuffy, preoccupied with movies and politics and reluctant to cover loud and snotty subcultural movements like punk and metal..."

"... whereas Creem’s pages first coined those genre’s names: 'punk rock' by Marsh, about ? and the Mysterians, and 'heavy metal' by Mike Saunders, about Sir Lord Baltimore, both in the May 1971 issue.... Subversive humor was the Creem lingua franca. Snarky photo captions and regular features like the Creem Dreems (tongue-in-cheek pinups of artists like Debbie Harry and Bebe Buell) were clearly intended for — and driven by — adolescent hormones.... [S]een through today’s eyes, some of the old Creem content can seem puerile, even offensive. The casual sexism and homophobia is sadly typical of its time, and racial sensitivity was nonexistent. Yet its anarchic attitude and early embrace of new wave and punk inspired future musicians like Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, Pearl Jam’s Jeff Ament and Metallica’s Kirk Hammett, who all appear in the film. In one scene, R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe recalls the first time he ever saw a copy of Creem, during detention in high school, and being mesmerized by a photo of Patti Smith. 'From that moment forward my entire life shifted and changed dramatically,' Stipe says. 'I was like, what world is this? Most people want to fit in somewhere. Because of my otherness, because of my queerness, I was trying to find that gang. I wasn’t going to find it in my high school. I found it in Creem magazine.'"

From "The Wild Story of Creem, Once ‘America’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll Magazine’/A new documentary traces the rise and fall of the irreverent, boundary-smashing music publication where Lester Bangs did some of his most famous work" (NYT).

Here's the trailer:

"In the early 1980s, his wife inherited roughly 1,000 acres near Macon, Georgia. He farmed yellow pine and built a fancy hunting camp..."

"... called Charlane Plantation (the name a fusion of his own and his wife’s, Rose Lane, a former assistant to the vice president of Capricorn Records in the ’70s), now about 2,900 acres. Leavell hosts wealthy clients, usually hard-core Stones fans, who hunt quail by day and drink liquor by night while listening to Leavell play piano. 'It’s like bringing the audience to you, instead of having to go on tour,' he says."

From "Mick and Keith—And Chuck: The Rolling Stones’ Essential, Unsung Rock-and-Roll Hero/Chuck Leavell, the Stones’ piano player and road musical director, keeps the musical peace between Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, and the sacred book of Stones tunes. 'How does it end?' he says. 'Nobody knows'" (Vanity Fair).

Here's the website for Charlane Plantation. In the sidebar there's a list of articles about the place: "'Without Wood There Would Be Hardly Any Music’: Chuck Leavell Talks Forest Preservation," "The Rolling Stones keyboardist shares his passion for music and sustainable forestry," "Chuck Leavell helping to conserve Macon’s natural habitats," "Macon Telegraph: More river land in Middle Georgia is forever preserved, and a rock star is part of it," "Charlane Plantation – Backyard conservation for kids."

"Chani Nicholas doesn’t care for the hulking Alex Katz painting, depicting a trio of suited white men, hanging behind the front desk of the Langham hotel in New York. It reminds her of the patriarchy..."

"... she tells me one rainy, starless night in February, as we take the elevator up to her hotel suite and sit on the couch. We’re wrapping up a conversation about privilege, gender equality and the zodiac when Nicholas, who’s become popular on Instagram as a kind of social-justice astrologer, notices a different art piece hovering behind her. This one, she likes. The painting, titled 'Mona,' portrays a woman who shares a striking resemblance to Nicholas – dark hair with tight curls, sharp brown eyes, a strong jawline. She compares it to the painting in the lobby. 'The hotel staff must’ve known not to put me in a room with a bunch of weird guys on the wall,' she says. 'I’m basically an angry feminist who just happens to be into astrology and healing.'"

So begins "Meet the Woman Bringing Social Justice to Astrology/Chani Nicholas is transforming horoscopes from quips about finding true love and stumbling into financial good fortune to pointed calls to action" (Rolling Stone)(via my son John at Facebook).

If you get far enough into that article, you'll see some material about a technology and culture reporter at The New York Times, Jenna Wortham:

“I think the Internet is really good at helping like-minded individuals find each other and affirm each other,” she says. “I know a lot of people in my life who don’t give a shit about astrology and think that my interest in star signs is ludacris [sic] and laughable, but I don’t have to talk to them,” she says....

Wortham thinks that the millennial interest in astrology has to do with the correction of an imbalance, in which people are looking at their relationship to technology and finding it, at least to a degree, unnatural. Because social media and the Internet require people to externalize so much of their lives, people are looking for ways to be more introspective, she says. “In the same way that we’re like, ‘What’s the quality of the food that we’re eating? We’re now like, ‘How are we living? Is there a better way to live?'”

Last year, Wortham went through a difficult breakup and decided to switch neighborhoods in Brooklyn.... “I took Chani’s advice, and I made [something] happen,” says Wortham.... “When I think back on it, I don’t think it would’ve been as easy for me to manage all the influxes of opportunity had my house not been in order.” Nicholas’s guidance, Wortham says, helped her affirm whether she was doing the right thing. “It’s cool feeling like there’s something correlating in the cosmos and on the earth,” she says.

I wonder what the NYT's idea of reporting on "technology and culture" really is. Is it articles on technology designed to draw in people who wouldn't normally read about technology? I went over to the NYT and found this video about astrology:



I had to shut that off because I felt a strong and physical revulsion to the visual style. It didn't remind me of the patriarchy or anything like that. It just made me feel like a very annoying robot had the delusion that he could amuse me and intended to relentlessly act on that delusion. I had my own delusion — that I would have a seizure if I didn't shut it off.

ADDED: Jenna Wortham's new article in the NYT Magazine is "On Instagram, Seeing Between the (Gender) Lines/Social Media Has Turned Out to Be the Perfect Tool For Nonbinary People to Find — and Model — Their Unique Places on the Gender Spectrum." Excerpt:

Personally, Vaid-Menon doesn’t identify as any gender. “Nonbinary is so oxymoronic,” Vaid-Menon told me. “We’re defining ourselves by an absence and not our abundance.” When pressed, they will describe themselves as transfeminine, gender-nonconforming and nonbinary — but only reluctantly. “I really try to escape having to put myself in these categories,” Vaid-Menon said. “I wanted to be free from boxes — not end up in a new one.” Social media is one of the few outlets for that uninhibited expression.

AND here's the Alex Katz painting at the Langham Hotel:



Significantly less evocative of the patriarchy than the Rolling Stone made it sound! The "trio of suited white men" is next to a trio of women. And the men aren't wearing suits. White Man #1 has a turtleneck under his jacket. White Man #2 doesn't seem to have a jacket. And White Man #3 has his shirt collar gaping open in a way that suggests he's not wearing a tie. All 6 adults are staring in the direction of a bright light source and all but the one man in prescription glasses are wearing sunglasses, so they're not in an office environment. Where are they? The background is dark, so it's a confusing setting, but there's no reason to think they're in a position to exercise patriarchal power. They're out for some kind of fun. And the women are in front of the men.

"#MeToo depends on the credibility of the journalists who report on it."

This is an excellent WaPo column by Megan McArdle.

McArdle says she was ready to write "It's now clear that Brett Kavanaugh's nomination cannot go forward" if another sexual assault allegation came out, but she changed her mind when she saw that New Yorker article about Deborah Ramirez. McArdle had thought that "a second allegation would be stronger, not weaker, than the first." She's "frankly surprised the New Yorker ran the article."

And so I'm writing a different column than I expected, about something I hadn't fully understood until I watched that seismic shift [toward expediting the process lest after nominee would go down to a string of unverifiable allegations]: the extent to which the success of #MeToo depends on the credibility of the journalists who report on it.

We hear the slogan "believe women" a lot, but even its strongest media proponents can't really mean it literally, because journalists know how often people tell them things that aren't true....

As #MeToo has grown, mainstream media outlets have generally been scrupulous about getting that confirmation before they publish. It's hard to overstate the dangers when that filter fails. When Rolling Stone failed to check allegations about gang rape at the University of Virginia, the magazine both smeared innocent young men and caused other victims to be treated more skeptically. And when a weak story breaks into an already raging political conflagration, it not only creates skepticism under which future abusers can shelter but also threatens to turn #MeToo into yet another divide in the culture wars.

In the #MeToo movement, it has seemed that multiple accusations have been crucial in taking down prominent men. And now here is a prominent man who began as the target of a desired takedown.  The first accusation inspired credulity because of the built-up strength of the believe-all-survivors ethic, but the second one felt so weak that it not only failed to strengthen the attack, it roused suspicion about the first accusation.

If only the authorities would do their work, then we could rely on them, McArdle seems to say. They've been "generally... scrupulous" in the past. Oh? Somehow I rankle at that idealized image. And I resist the complacency about professionalized journalism and its alliance with a political movement. It's up to us, the citizenry, to maintain our vigilance. No shortcuts. You can't "believe all women" or trust the "mainstream" press. Pay attention and sharpen up, or we are lost.

NOTE: This is the fifth in a series of posts about Kavanaugh this morning. Comments on this post should only be about this article. Here's my post warning you that a series of posts is forthcoming. If you want to draw attention to other articles, do so in the comments section for that post, not this one.

"But I’m being asked to give up on Charlie Rose, Kevin Spacey, Al Franken, Louis CK and Garrison Keillor, just to name a few. In a way, I’m starting to feel violated."

From the top-rated comment on "The Smearing of Woody Allen" (NYT):

Dylan Farrow’s memory could plausibly have been altered by the intense atmosphere surrounding the charges, and she may have a perfectly sincere but false memory of the events. It’s telling that her story changed during the initial investigation, but that she’s absolutely certain now, many years later.

Or maybe I’m wrong. If so, I’m deeply sorry. But I’m being asked to give up on Charlie Rose, Kevin Spacey, Al Franken, Louis CK and Garrison Keillor, just to name a few. In a way, I’m starting to feel violated. I don’t want to give up on Woody Allen, and it will take more than an unsubstantiated accusation to make me do so.

From the op-ed itself, which is by Bret Stephens:

Soon after Rolling Stone published a sensational — and, as it turned out, false — account of a gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity, Richard Bradley, the editor of Worth magazine, suspected that something was amiss.... [W]hat most stirred Bradley’s doubt was how perfectly the story played “into existing biases,” especially the sorts of biases Rolling Stone readers might harbor about fraternity life at Southern universities. Since the account of the rape “felt” true, it was easy to assume it was....

That makes me think of Michael Wolff. Remember him?

Michael Wolff asked on MSNBC about the factual errors in his Trump book.

His actual response: "If it makes sense to you, if it strikes a cord, if it rings true, it is true."

Katy Tur response: "I read it, I -- a lot of the did feel true"

This is Journalisming. pic.twitter.com/IOowlxWNvV

— Benny (@bennyjohnson) January 8, 2018

(By the way, you strike a chord, not a cord.)

"Rolling Stone: Stories From The Edge... a bizarre documentary... immediately devolves into gratuitous naked-groupie footage..."

"... (although at least now we know exactly how those famous plaster-casts are made). Ostensibly because this was Rolling Stone’s first significant story? It’s not really clear. It’s actually less clear when we go from Jefferson Airplane’s San Fran mansion to Ike and Tina Turner’s living room, to delve into a RS feature story on the couple. We’re left with a troubling quote by Tina that she has to do what Ike says, and then we’re on to the first of many John Lennon interviews. Sure, we know how Ike and Tina turn out, but the cuts are discordant enough to be jarring.... Even more frustrating are the brief glimpses of the offices filled with overflowing ashtrays, and the typewriters, and the galleys, laid out using rubber cement and X-Acto knives; since today’s publishing world is a far cry from all that, a closer look would have been welcome...."

From "HBO’s Rolling Stone: Stories From The Edge is a hell of a puff piece" in the AV Club.

I got about an hour into the show before pausing, perhaps never to go back. I could not believe how they plunged into the groupie material. And there was absolutely no critique, no perspective on groupies. Just these young women, presenting themselves as culture heroes, charting their own course, which is, supposedly, having sex with as many rock stars as possible and — in the case of the Plaster Casters — doing their own art project and taking home trophies.

What could go wrong? Who's still alive and in any condition to speak of the aftermath? Nobody shows up to say the women's point of view presented in Rolling Stone was fake (like the recent Rolling Stone article about the UVa gang rape). And in the background — as if we're still living in 1969 and not in the days of The Reckoning — the music that plays is The Rolling Stones, "Stray Cat Blues." The lyric jumped out at me:

I can see that you're fifteen years old
No I don't want your I.D.
You look so restless and you're so far from home
But it's no hanging matter
It's no capital crime...

We're still adulating the Rolling Stones, despite their raucous celebration of sex with a 15 year old.

I'm happy to watch a documentary about Rolling Stone and the people it covered over the years, but can't we get some edge? It's all a soppy love fest — ironically the opposite of the style of journalism that made it worth doing a documentary about in the first place.

Jann Wenner "swears his bohemian mother once called him 'the worst child she had ever met.'"

From "The Licentious Life and Times of Jann Wenner," a NYT review of the book "STICKY FINGERS/The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine." Wenner also said that when divorcing, each of his 2 parents fought to get the other to take this terrible child. The mother took the 2 daughters and the father got stuck with the boy.

From the book:

Weiner began a campaign to get his parents back together.... "Your demand that Dad and I be something to each other that we're not, is basically a child's demand," she wrote to him in 1959, when Wenner was thirteen. "One stamps one's foot and says, 'Change the world and I will be all right!" and it's a nice comforting thought to have, or rather, only one thing that you can change, and that is yourself." ("Maternally yours," she signed the letter.)

I haven't read the book, just that part. I don't know if Wenner's mother really did call him "the worst child [I've] ever met." He said she did, but he seems like a liar or at least someone who'd put his own gloss on a story, but I think the funniest word in the phrase is "met" — as if her own child was one of a large number of acquaintances. It fits with the idea that he is "the worst," as if the comparison to the other children had nothing to do with her. She's just looking on and observing that Jann is the worst of the bunch. If he is the worst, surely her role in his formation — however small — was enough to make him worse than the next-to-the-worst.

But he's responsible for himself, she told him in that "Maternally yours" letter she wrote when he was 13. It takes a lot of nerve for a mother to say that. Most mothers, I think, feel that any badness in their children is our own badness, carried out into the world and doing damage that weighs on our reputation even as it is beyond our control.

"From a loft in San Francisco in 1967, a 21-year-old named Jann S. Wenner started a magazine that would become the counterculture bible for baby boomers."

"Rolling Stone defined cool, cultivated literary icons and produced star-making covers that were such coveted real estate they inspired a song. But the headwinds buffeting the publishing industry, and some costly strategic missteps, have steadily taken a financial toll on Rolling Stone, and a botched story three years ago about an unproven gang rape at the University of Virginia badly bruised the magazine’s journalistic reputation. And so, after a half-century reign that propelled him into the realm of the rock stars and celebrities who graced his covers, Mr. Wenner is putting his company’s controlling stake in Rolling Stone up for sale, relinquishing his hold on a publication he has led since its founding."

The NYT reports.

I wonder how much they thought about that phrase "an unproven gang rape" and what alternatives they considered. To my ear, it sounds as though they're implying that there was a gang rape, but it just couldn't be proved. The story was completely debunked!

On January 12, 2015, Charlottesville Police Department officials told UVA that an investigation had failed to find any evidence confirming the events in the Rolling Stone article.... At the request of Rolling Stone publisher Jann S. Wenner, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism agreed to audit the editorial processes that culminated in the article being published....

In light of the findings, Erik Wemple of The Washington Post pronounced the story "a complete crock". In the Columbia Journalism Review, Bill Grueskin called the story "a mess—thinly sourced, full of erroneous assumptions, and plagued by gaping holes in the reporting." The Columbia Journalism Review called the story "this year's media-fail sweepstakes" and the Poynter Institute named it as the "Error of the Year" in journalism.

The NYT has a separate article that's a tribute to the greatness of Rolling Stone over the years: "It filled its pages with the words of renowned writers, including Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Cameron Crowe and Greil Marcus." Yes, it's very sad that we don't get journalism like that anymore. These days, I love reading old articles by Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe. And I remember the day back in the 1960s, when I was in high school, I first saw the publication waved about by a classmate who acted like he had his hands on something very special. How important is this thing supposed to be?, I wondered. We already have Crawdaddy.

Jury finds Rolling Stone liable in the defamation suit over its false fraternity-gang-rape story about the University of Virginia

The winning plaintiff is Nicole P. Eramo, who was the associate dean of students, the NYT reports.

[I]n videotaped testimony shown during the trial, Jann S. Wenner, Rolling Stone’s founder and editor, said the magazine was wrong to retract the story fully.

“We did everything reasonable, appropriate up to the highest standards of journalism to check on this thing,” Mr. Wenner said. “The one thing we didn’t do was confront Jackie’s accusers — the rapists.”

Referring to Jackie, Mr. Wenner said there was nothing a journalist could do “if someone is really determined to commit a fraud.”

The jury didn't buy that.  And Eramo was deemed a public figure so the verdict represents a finding that the publisher either knew the story was false or had reckless disregard for whether or not it was true.

There's a second lawsuit brought by the fraternity.

"A total of eight women and two men have been selected to serve as the jury."

In the Rolling Stone defamation trial.

On the Sunday morning shows, a lot of people who don't like Trump were offering Trump advice.

I can't believe any of it was good advice — unless it was good advice offered on the theory that Trump wouldn't trust them to give him good advice, so he might do the opposite. Everyone, it seemed, was telling Trump that he needs to stop defending himself against all the mud slung his way. He should stick to the real issues, you see, and not get distracted. So: Let everyone hit him and not fight back?

I'll just give one example. I watch all the shows, and it was getting to the point where we were laughing at the repetition of the don't-get-distracted advice from people who were obviously not Trump proponents. This one was on "Fox News Sunday," with Bret Baier questioning the Democratic strategist Joe Trippi.

BAIER:  You know, Joe, you saw Mike Pence.  He's been answering these questions about the allegations. 

Earlier on the show, Baier had interviewed Pence and referred to "the accusations" and "nine women with these allegations." He never said the word "sex" or "sexual assault" or "groping." We were supposed to know what he was talking about and (I guess) appreciate that he wasn't so crass as to mention sex.

I didn't go down the road too far, but, I mean, you have to think he's wincing on some of these answers or some of this campaigning about the accusers. 

JOE TRIPPI, FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR:  Well, he has to be because part of the whole problem, the difference in the polling numbers, is women. And they've moved away from Trump, even groups that tend to be Republican with women. Moderate Republican women are moving away. And so, this isn't how you get them back. They're gettable because they've been voting Republican all these years. So, and they’ve got arguments. But the argument isn't to go after the accusers.  So, I think this is a -- that's what I think is going to be interesting about this debate.  Is that the Donald Trump that shows up that goes after the accusers and keeps giving Clinton this advantage or does he try to reach out to them?  That's what I think is going to be the key.

Trippi is just one example of that. It's like a memo went out: If Trump wants to win he needs to leave those accusers alone. Don't respond. But Trippi doesn't want Trump to win. 

ADDED: Trippi seems to assume that the only way for Trump to defend himself is to "go after" the women. Even though Trump's opponent has a record of attacking women who made sexual allegations against her husband, Trump could stress the unfairness of dropping these stories so late in the process. And there might be a way to connect this to the Rolling Stone trial that's starting tomorrow. Allegations can be false and the process can be unfair. That could inspire some empathy for the pugnacious billionaire. Who knows?

"Jackie" — who told the discredited fraternity gang rape story published in Rolling Stone — is forced to testify in the defamation lawsuit.

The federal judge Glen E.Conrad has rejected the argument — made by "Jackie"'s lawyers — that testimony will "re-victimize" her and psychologically damage her.

The judge’s order stems from a lawsuit brought by UVA associate dean of students Nicole Eramo, who alleges that Rolling Stone’s Nov. 2014 article cast her as the callous villain of its tale and falsely asserted that she discouraged a student identified only as “Jackie” from taking her rape allegations to the police. Rolling Stone, which apologized to readers for the story, strongly denies that it defamed the university official and declined to comment on Tuesday’s ruling....

Ms. Eramo, in court papers, alleges that Jackie is “a serial liar” who fabricated her claims and served as “Rolling Stone’s sole source for the false tale of rape that it recklessly published.” That makes Jackie’s testimony “highly relevant” to the defamation claims, her lawyers say.

IN THE COMMENTS: Ignorance is Bliss said...

re-victimize

Assumes facts not in evidence.

That made me think of what Patricia J. Williams wrote in her book "The Alchemy of Race and Rights" about Tawana Brawley: Brawley "has been the victim of some unspeakable crime. No matter how she got there. No matter who did it to her and even if she did it to herself."