If the UVa frat sues Rolling Stone, "they are opening up every young man in that fraternity to scrutiny — their drinking habits, and I’m sure some of them are underage..."

"... their sexual habits, and their overall conduct....  It just seems like there’s a whole host of issues that could be there, and it would be unfair and unwise to subject these young men to that," Charles Tobin — who specializes in defamation law — told WaPo's Terrence McCoy.

In addition to that skeletons-in-the-closet problem, McCoy points out the problem of a group claiming defamation:

The Rolling Stone article doesn’t specifically name any student beyond pseudonyms and descriptions that aren’t matched by any member of the frat house....

For any group to have a justifiable claim, wrote Ellyn Tracy Marcus in the California Law Review in 1983, the group needs to be small. "As group size increases, courts become skeptical that the defamation could reasonably be understood to refer to any individual group member. … Reasonable persons do not take literally statements defaming groups of people, and understand such statements only as generalizations or exaggerations."

I'm looking at that law review article, and it's talking about, for example, a case where individual D.C. taxi drivers tried to sue The Washington Post for an article portraying D.C. cab drivers as rude louts. Rolling Stone besmirched the name of a specific frat. Anyway, McCoy also links to Eugene Volokh's analysis (from last December, before the recent news that the police investigation has found absolutely no evidence to support the rape anecdote told by Rolling Stone). Volokh discusses "defamation of a group," but then moves on to the separate topic of "Defamation of the fraternity": "Corporations and unincorporated associations that have recognized legal identities (such as unions, partnerships and the like) can also sue for defamation that causes injury to their organizational reputation, independently of whether any member was defamed."

I'm not a libel law expert, but I see the "group libel" problem as addressing whether individual frat members could successfully claim to have been defamed because their frat was defamed. If the frat sues as an entity, there's no "group libel" problem.

"But looking back at Schock’s history, his preternatural drive is unsettling, even for a politician."

"Schock didn’t want two phone lines. He wanted six. He didn’t want one credit card in middle school. He wanted 13. He wasn’t satisfied graduating high school in four years. He didn’t want to just sit on the school board — he wanted to be its president. He wanted to be the youngest everything. Health wasn’t enough. He needed a six-pack. He didn’t want his office to be beige. He wanted it red."

From "The self-destructive mania of Rep. Aaron Schock," by Terrence McCoy.

ADDED: Aaron Schock's father said: "Aaron is a little different... He wears stylish clothing and yet he’s not gay…and he’s not married and he’s not running around with women, so everybody is throwing up their arms. They can’t figure out Aaron, so he must be crooked. So attack him, bring him down, because he doesn’t fit into our picture."

"Why, Suh, why? The answer may actually be quite simple: Suh simply can’t help it."

"There’s something almost pathological about his play," writes Terrence McCoy at WaPo.

“Emotions drive athlete behavior much more than rational thought,” Adam Naylor of Boston University told New York Magazine in June. “Intense emotions can lead to incredible performances, but they can also lead to total boneheadedness. Frustration is known to lead to aggression.”

Behavior on the field that by every estimation is stupid – like biting or stomping – is almost always extemporaneous, explained Thomas Fawcett of the University of Salford when he expounded on Suarez’s biting demons in 2013. “It’s not pre-planned – it’s a very spontaneous, emotional response,” he told the BBC. “He’s doing it on impulse.”

This is an insulting diagnosis. If Suh actually can't help it, he shouldn't be allowed to play.

ADDED: I just clicked on my Terrence McCoy tag. He's the "This graph proves it" guy. ("I'm surprised to see he's a Washington Post Foreign Affairs Reporter.")

Credulous journalist ponders why journalists are so credulous.

Well, this is rich. I'd never noticed the name Terrence McCoy until yesterday. A tweet of his — featuring a patently defective graph — was embedded at an Atlantic article titled "The Rolling Stone Fiasco Is Terrible News for Rape Survivors." His tweet said "Let's be clear about one thing. Fraudulent accusations of rape are extraordinarily rare. This graph proves it." I used that absurd kicker "This graph proves it" as the title for my post.

Later in the day, I see that the tweet doesn't display, so I go to Twitter, find Terrence McCoy's Twitter feed, and I say:

I'm surprised to see he's a Washington Post Foreign Affairs Reporter. He's got a new tweet that says: "Just read more into the Enliven graph. It was a misleading graph. I've since taken it down." He links to a January 2013 WaPo article about the graph "Patrick Pexton: A flawed image of rape on Wonkblog":

... On Jan. 7, an infographic citing rape statistics appeared on Wonkblog in a post written by Dylan Matthews, who came to The Post last year after graduating from Harvard....

The blog post generated a lot of Web hits for The Post and the Enliven Project. It stirred controversy and discussion of sexual violence. But it damaged Wonkblog’s credibility, and that of The Post, and harmed the legitimate issue of addressing violence against women.

Real reporting takes time, analysis, and inquiry. Post bloggers need to be more careful.

This morning, I look at The Washington Post, notice the latest coverage of the Rolling Stone story ("The epic Rolling Stone gang-rape fallout — and how major publications get it wrong"), and I'm amazed/amused to see the byline: Terrence McCoy!

Among the first to perceive cracks in the facade of Rolling Stone’s piece on campus gang rape was editor Richard Bradley. On Nov. 24, days before The Washington Post reported problems with the piece and Rolling Stone confessed its failings, Bradley said he smelled something fishy. “I’m not convinced that this gang rape actually happened,” he wrote. “Something about this story doesn’t feel right.”

He should know. He once edited Stephen Glass, the notorious fabulist who authored a series of made-up stories for the New Republic and other publications....

Journalists pride themselves on their skepticism. But this one, Bradley said, passed his smell-test because it exploited pre-existing biases...

Just like the way that Enliven graph was the slam-dunk shut-up-already proof that false accusations of rape are extraordinarily rare.

“Stephen wrote what he knew I was inclined to believe,” Bradley wrote on his blog. “And because I was inclined to believe it, I abandoned my critical judgement. I lowered my guard.”....

“One must be most critical about stories that play into existing biases,” he wrote. “And this story nourishes a lot of them: biases against fraternities, against men, against the South; biases about the naivete of young women, especially Southern women; pre-existing beliefs about the prevalence — indeed, the existence — of rape culture; extant suspicions about the hostility of university bureaucracies to sexual assault complaints that can produce unflattering publicity.”...

“The lesson I learned,” wrote the editor Bradley, is that “One must be most critical, in the best sense of that word, about what one is already inclined to believe.”

Not a word about McCoy's own embarrassment over yesterday's tweet.

The expression "fake but accurate" is really all we need to understand the problem, and it's pathetic that journalists at the WaPo level haven't fully internalized the lessons of these old scandals. Tweeting one day and cogitating over the general problem the next — it's so sloppy, so lazy, so stupid.

By the way, the phrase "fake but accurate" only comes up once in a search of the Washington Post archive, and it was not in the context of self-criticism. They were excoriating "This American Life." WaPo has done a fine job leading the way in dismantling the Rolling Stone's big story. But that was making click bait out of their competitor's click bait. I need to see self-criticism to believe I'm witnessing any commitment to journalistic ethics. McCoy's piece today only makes me feel more skeptical, because he's writing about journalism in the abstract and what other people have done wrong, and I saw what he did yesterday.

ADDED: I must stress that when McCoy took down his tweet, he shifted the blame away from himself, saying: "Just read more into the Enliven graph. It was a misleading graph. I've since taken it down." He didn't just take down the graph. He took down his own mistakenly self-assured statement: "Let's be clear about one thing. Fraudulent accusations of rape are extraordinarily rare. This graph proves it." It wasn't just "a misleading graph" by Enliven. It was a misleading assertion by a journalist. If he's done a mea culpa for that, I haven't seen it.

"This graph proves it."

Let's be clear about one thing. Fraudulent accusations of rape are extraordinarily rare. This graph proves it.— Terrence McCoy (@terrence_mccoy) December 5, 2014

Image at the Atlantic article "The Rolling Stone Fiasco Is Terrible News for Rape Survivors/When sexual assault reports turn out to be inaccurate—even slightly so—nobody wins."

The chart is puzzling:

As the chart above, from The Enliven Project, shows, only about 2 to 8 percent of rape claims turn out to be fabricated, but those that are echo in the media and in public discourse for seemingly much longer than the true ones do.

The 2 figures down there in the lower right corner are necessarily within the category of persons who've been falsely accused. The light brown figures are all rapists who have not been accused of rape.* The unaccused individuals must be those against whom a true accusation of rape could be charged. Quite aside from the usual question about how one arrives at the number of those who could accurately be accused but were not, in order to visualize the proportion of falsely accused persons, we'd need another set of figures on the chart: those who would be falsely accused if the reporting of rape occurred often enough to include all of the light brown figures on the graph.

The graph-makers presume they know that the unaccused are really rapists, but no one is testing the veracity of their nonexistent accusers. It's built into the concept of the graph that we know the accusations against them are true. The 2 figures in the lower right corner are separated from the group in the upper right corner, the persons against whom accusations were made. The proportion looks much different if you put them there, where they belong. It's important to realize that we can only have a falsely accused person when a person is accused.

And what does it mean to say that "only about 2 to 8 percent of rape claims turn out to be fabricated"? In the United States, anyone accused of a crime has the presumption of innocence, and when a complaint is made but the accused doesn't end up in prison, we don't learn whether the complainant was lying, only that a decision was made not to charge, or the effort to force the accused into a plea bargain failed, or the evidence didn't convince the factfinder of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. In some of those cases, perhaps the claim was "fabricated." Anyway, "fabricated" is a strong term, and it seems chosen to minimize the problem of possibly excessive reports of rape. "Fabricated" excludes complaints based on confusion and mistake, which might arise after intoxication or through a failure to understand the legal elements of rape.

"This graph proves it." That's either stupid or evil.
________________________________

* Why are we counting "rapists" rather than rapes? Did the Enliven Project leap from a number for unreported rapes to a number of individual rapists? It's scary to have a graph covered in little figures of men, but if rapists don't commit multiple rapes, they're less scary, if you bother to think about it logically.

UPDATE: The original post embedded a tweet that became unavailable later in the day. I got the same graph from here, and I left the text of the tweet from the HTML code for the embed.

AND: Here's Terrence McCoy's Twitter feed. I'm surprised to see he's a Washington Post Foreign Affairs Reporter. He's got a new tweet that says: "Just read more into the Enliven graph. It was a misleading graph. I've since taken it down." He links to a January 2013 WaPo article about the graph "Patrick Pexton: A flawed image of rape on Wonkblog":

It’s a fact of journalistic life today that blog entries aren’t vetted as thoroughly as fully reported news stories are... On Jan. 7, an infographic citing rape statistics appeared on Wonkblog in a post written by Dylan Matthews, who came to The Post last year after graduating from Harvard.

The Enliven Project, a new nonprofit advocacy group that promotes more open discussion of sexual violence, produced the infographic... One reader wrote to me and Matthews, however, to say that it was distorted, misleading and a lie.... I read the studies that underlay the infographic and its critiques. Individually, some of the statistics that Enliven used do appear in the studies. But Enliven made assumptions and extrapolations in consolidating this information into one graphic, rendering it misleading....

The blog post generated a lot of Web hits for The Post and the Enliven Project. It stirred controversy and discussion of sexual violence. But it damaged Wonkblog’s credibility, and that of The Post, and harmed the legitimate issue of addressing violence against women.

Real reporting takes time, analysis, and inquiry. Post bloggers need to be more careful.

Post bloggers and Post tweeters.