For a brief and shining moment, sanity returned to journalism as Sabrina Rubin Erdely was revealed to have sold a lie about a rape that never happened.  The University of Virginia was not amused. Rolling Stone magazine retracted the story and apologized for sucking.  Erdely was found walking down dark alleyways, bumping into walls, over and over, mumbling “so what, so what?”

It almost seemed as if the media remembered the one word that required a trigger warning more than any other: facts.  Then the moment devolved into another word, excuses, and spittle shot from advocates’ mouth, striking anyone within earshot.

At the New Republic, freelance writer Jessica Luther seeks to rehabilitate advocacy journalism with an argument against facts, against relying on evidence when there are feelings to be told.  She begins by taking issue with Mike Taibbi’s offer of a very cautious approach:

Then Taibbi, without being asked, offered some advice on how to report on sexual assault. “One way around that, you know, would be for people to cover cases that have already been adjudicated… so that the reporters don’t have to go out on a limb to say that this or that happened. They can rely on something that happened, that’s already been proven in court,” he said.

Adjudicated cases would certainly limit the pool of available stories to those proven to have happened, but was that good enough?

As the UVA story was falling apart in late November and early December, I was working on a 6,000-word article for Vice Sports about a campus sexual assault. It centered on a single survivor. While the woman in my story had never reported to the police, my report differed from the Rolling Stone feature because the university had done a disciplinary hearing and I had access to those documents. I was not relying solely on the story of a survivor, but it was her account that did the heavy lifting. Beyond that, I have spoken to multiple survivors of sexual assault, on campus and otherwise, who want nothing more than to tell their stories to a journalist who will listen with compassion. I have listened to women who struggle through post-traumatic stress disorder to tell their stories.

[Aside: Freelance writers usually get paid by the word, so there is an incentive to be a bit wordy in their writing.  That does not mean, however, that they are qualified to diagnose psychiatric illness, any more than cancer. But post-traumatic stress disorder is four words, which beats “trauma,” which is only one.]

So the story about which she was writing was different, because, well, she says so. She believed, and there were university disciplinary docs, but mostly because “survivors . . . want nothing more than to tell their stories to a journalist who will listen with compassion.”

But the legitimacy of journalism comes from writers who listen to stories with skepticism.  Writers who don’t believe because they believe, but believe because evidence bears up under scrutiny.  That was the lesson of the UVA/Erdely fiasco. Luther learned nothing.

The reason I dislike Taibbi’s advice is not only because adjudicated cases constitute a minority of the cases. It’s because journalists need to embrace that the very way we practice our craft makes us suspicious to victims. Survivors don’t think people will believe them.

Whether “adjudicated cases” are a minority depends on the validity of claims to the contrary, claims that by definition are untested.  Luther acknowledges that “the way we practice our craft” makes “survivors” suspicious, which is, of course, the way journalists should do their job.  Her point, of course, is that this inhibits people from telling their stories.

There’s a reason for this. As a society, when we discuss sexual assault cases, the conversation centers not on who did it or how, but rather if a crime even happened.

Finally, Luther hits her stride. The problem is that journalists, if they are doing their job properly, must address the foundational question before reaching the teary story that “survivors” want them to tell.  Did “a crime even happen”?

Even that requisite question, simple on its face, requires a much digging to find anything remotely resembling an answer. Did any conduct occur? If so, what conduct? Was the conduct wrongful? Are there other interpretations of the conduct which would suggest it was not wrongful? And finally, even if it was wrongful, was it a crime?

It’s not up to journalists, or lawyers for that matter, to decide that some conduct was a crime. A crime is something decided by a legal determination, whether by jury at trial or judge at plea. It’s a legal term of art, not a feeling strongly held by a writer.

But more to the point, facts are established by evidence, not feelings, not passion, not belief.  Testimony, the stories of those Luther pre-describes as “survivors,” can be evidence.  But like all evidence, its strength and sufficiency is derived from being able to withstand scrutiny.  Luther ain’t having any.

The nightmare of what happened with the UVA story was that a woman whose story should never have been told was handed over on a platter to a public that feasts on picking apart sexual assault survivor’s stories. The nightmare is that other victims of sexual violence watched all of that happen. The fear is not that journalists will shy away from these stories but that survivors will now be even more reluctant to trust their stories to the journalists who want to do this work.

There is another “nightmare” that Luther fails to recognize, that false stories that confirm the bias of journalists (and readers) will slip through their duty to be skeptical, to only report things that actually happened, that actually happened the way they write they happened, that are real.

The fear is that journalists, in their mad rush to promote that in which they passionately believe, will shrug off the absence of evidence, and ignore the foundational question of whether the conduct happened at all in order to write the story about how the survivor felt about it.  The fear is that the bright and shining moment that facts matter, the lesson of Sabrina Rubin Erdely, has already been forgotten.