Running head: A REVIEW 1
A Review of ‘A Rape on Campus’ and ‘A Rape on Campus’ What went Wrong?
Zhaoxue Li
2
What the Reporter and the Editor Did Right and Wrong
The Reporter
When writing a story, a reporter must try to be objective, truthful and fair. Reporters have
a journalistic duty to ensure that the stories they write are factual, which means that they have to
based on facts they can find and collect. This was not the case for a story that was published in
Rolling Stone magazine in November, 2014 by Sabrina Rubin Elderly. Sabrina, then a freelance
writer, led Rolling Stone in covering the case of Jackie, a student at the University of Virginia. It
was a coverage of a gang rape that Jackie allegedly experienced at a fraternity house party at the
University. Inasmuch as Sabrina ended up being a reporter who had her story retracted, there
were several things she did right, but the majority of what she did with it was wrong in terms of
journalistic ethics.
