Naomi Schaefer Riley

Naomi Schaefer Riley

Opinion

Facts matter: Left sticks to ‘narratives,’ evidence be damned

The verdict’s in on Rolling Stone. According to no less an authority than the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, the magazine’s story last year on a University of Virginia gang rape was a “journalistic failure [that] encompassed reporting, editing, editorial supervision and fact-checking.”

But as with many other stories that don’t fit into the right narrative, the media will continue to draw the wrong lessons.

As an AP article noted, “Despite its flaws, the article heightened scrutiny of campus sexual assaults amid a campaign by President Barack Obama.”

Despite its flaws? You mean despite the fact that as far as anyone can tell, the story was made up out of whole cloth?

Even once the police investigated the claims of the alleged victim, The New York Times reported: “Some saw a more complex picture, saying that the uproar over the story and the steps that the university had taken since in an effort to change its culture had, in the end, raised awareness and probably done the school, and the nation, some good.”

How has the university benefited from the fact that a fraternity has been falsely accused of a horrific crime? And how has the nation benefited from the false but now widespread belief that violent rape, even gang rape, is raging on US campuses?

Wouldn’t it have done more good for people to know that young women are statistically less likely to be attacked on a campus than off one?

But who cares about the facts as long as awareness has been raised? Take the case of Ellen Pao, who filed suit against her former employer, venture capital group Kleiner Perkins, for gender ­discrimination.

She was seeking millions of dollars in damages to make up for what she claimed was a pattern of women being excluded from important meetings. They weren’t invited on a ski trip with other partners. Women were forced to sit in the back of the room during a meeting.

Two weeks ago, a jury decided her claims were completely without merit. And yet from the media coverage, you’d think Ellen Pao successfully exposed a Silicon Valley rife with discrimination.

Here’s Farjad Manjoo in The New York Times: “The trial has nevertheless accomplished something improbable . . . The case has also come to stand for something bigger than itself. It has blown open a conversation about the status of women in an industry that, for all its talk of transparency and progress, has always been buttoned up about its shortcomings.”

In a Bloomberg article called “Ellen Pao Lost, Women Didn’t,” Katie Benner declared: “The case broke wide open the issue of sexism in a powerful, influential industry.”

Or take the Atlantic, which declared, “Ellen Pao’s claim against top venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins seems to have come up short, but it’s brought heightened attention to gender discrimination in tech.”

Come up short? She lost.

There was no merit to her claims. If Silicon Valley is so filled with sexist pigs acting illegally, perhaps we could find a case where they actually did that.

What Ellen Pao successfully did is what most people who file frivolous lawsuits do: They make it harder for companies to do business. They make it more expensive to cover their behinds.

They push everyone to make sure they never put anything substantive in an email, and hire large numbers of bureaucrats to ensure that another lawsuit isn’t filed. Or if it is, it’s settled out of court.

This is not unlike what happened after the Justice Department released its report on the shooting of Michael Brown last summer.

The only “lesson” that could really be drawn from the DOJ report and the grand jury’s non-indictment was that you shouldn’t knock over convenience stores, but if you do and a police officer catches you, it’s probably not a good idea to ­resist arrest.

But that was not the lesson that others wanted to emphasize. Which is why the Ferguson police now have to try to change the composition of their staff and ticketing policies — though they have no bearing on the case at hand.

Even The Washington Post’s Jonathan Capeheart, whose article “ ‘Hands Up, Don’t Shoot’ Was Built on a Lie” offered a kind of mea culpa for rushing to judgment in the case, concluded: “Yet this does not diminish the importance of the real issues unearthed in Ferguson by Brown’s death. Nor does it discredit what has become the larger ‘Black Lives Matter.’ ”

Actually, yes, it does diminish the importance because it calls into question whether those were real issues at all.

Maybe we’ve spent too much time around preschool teachers. Maybe we are so used to being infantilized by the media that we hardly notice these rejoinders at the end of every story, assuring us that even if the story was all wrong, the narrative was correct.

Not everything has to be a teachable moment. And if we do need a moral to every story, it would be useful to find one based on the facts.

Naomi Schaefer Riley is a ­senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum.