Facts ignored in moral panic

Article here. Excerpt:

'T. Rees Shapiro, The Washington Post reporter who has done an amazing job covering the debacle of Rolling Stone’s story about an alleged rape at the University of Virginia, has gotten an interview with members of Phi Kappa Psi. This is the fraternity that was accused in the article of staging some sort of gang-rape initiation ritual. And the story its members tell is more than a little worrying.

The fraternity brothers say they knew within 24 hours that the Rolling Stone story was false — provably false, because their internal records and bank statements showed no party on the weekend in question, and no brothers matched the description of the alleged rapist. Yet the brothers kept quiet because they thought that fighting the story in the news media “would only make things more difficult.”

Think about that. They had evidence they could have shown to a reporter to demonstrate the problems with a story, and they decided not to because that might only get them into deeper trouble.
...
When people are in the grip of a moral panic, going up against them to question the extent of a threat, even by doubting so much as a single case, can become dangerous. Questioning any expression of the panic is not seen as a logical debate over statistics or the details of a particular instance, but as somehow defending the threatening behavior.

Note how careful many people who wrote skeptically about the UVA case were to say that they believe campus rape happens, and it is terrible.

People who write that they think an accused murderer may be innocent rarely feel compelled to affirm that yes, they sure do believe that murder happens, and boy, are they against that. This ought to go without saying, and unless we are in the middle of a moral panic, it usually does.

Yet once moral panic sets in, an accusation can also become sufficient evidence unto itself to trigger a severe response: no need to see what the brothers might have to say, or to wait for a police investigation, before you write that op-ed article about rape culture — or start throwing bricks.'