Just published: "Rolling Stone and UVA: The Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism Report."

"An anatomy of a journalistic failure," by Sheila Coronel, Steve Coll, Derek Kravitz.

[The Rolling Stone writer Sabrina Rubin] Erdely believed firmly that Jackie's account was reliable. So did her editors and the story's fact-checker, who spent more than four hours on the telephone with Jackie, reviewing every detail of her experience. "She wasn't just answering, 'Yes, yes, yes,' she was correcting me," the checker said. "She was describing the scene for me in a very vivid way. � I did not have doubt." (Rolling Stone requested that the checker not be named because she did not have decision-making authority.)...

The problem of confirmation bias � the tendency of people to be trapped by pre-existing assumptions and to select facts that support their own views while overlooking contradictory ones � is a well-established finding of social science. It seems to have been a factor here. Erdely believed the university was obstructing justice. She felt she had been blocked. Like many other universities, UVA had a flawed record of managing sexual assault cases. Jackie's experience seemed to confirm this larger pattern. Her story seemed well established on campus, repeated and accepted.