How gullible journalists do harm to rape victims

Article here. Excerpt:

'Unfortunately, when you start out committed to a narrative, you tend to be looking for reasons to believe, instead of reasons to doubt.

Journalists are not the only ones who want to believe. There were powerful voices saying rape was a special sort of crime, one that must be treated very differently from other sorts of crimes. Rape is, unfortunately, a difficult crime to prosecute: There are generally only two witnesses, sometimes one or both of whom are often impaired by intoxicants, and even if you think that the rate of false accusations is “only” 8 percent . . . well, an 8 percent chance that any given rape accusation is false gets you at least a big start toward “reasonable doubt.”

This enrages a lot of activists, as well it should; every rape left unprosecuted is a tragic injustice. But activists pushed the notion that the answer was to use weaker standards of evidence, to refrain from questioning victims’ stories, to err on the side of believing accusers rather than giving the accused the benefit of the doubt. They weren’t very successful in the criminal justice system, but they were successful in campus judiciary proceedings — and perhaps they also succeeded in getting journalists like Erdely to change the standards they used to evaluate rape accusations.'