The NYT has the story here:
Rolling Stone magazine retracted its article about a brutal gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity after the release of a report on Sunday that concluded the widely discredited piece was the result of failures at every stage of the process.
The report, published by the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and commissioned by Rolling Stone, said the magazine failed to engage in “basic, even routine journalistic practice” to verify details of the ordeal that the magazine’s source, identified only as Jackie, described to the article’s author, Sabrina Rubin Erdely.
On Sunday, Ms. Erdely, in her first extensive comments since the article was cast into doubt, apologized to Rolling Stone’s readers, her colleagues and “any victims of sexual assault who may feel fearful as a result of my article.” …
The real howler is that no one’s suffering employment consequences. Erdley’s a freelancer, and RS states it will continue to accept her stories. No one at RS is losing their job over this, either.
The publishing of the original story is just about as total a failure of journalistic ethics as I can imagine. It did great damage to many innocent young people at UVA, and as Erdley obliquely admits, it did great damage to victims everywhere. And nobody’s getting fired. I wonder what the heck you’d have to do at RS to get yourself canned, if this isn’t it.
There are clear infractions that have gotten writers fired at Rolling Stone, like for writing a bad review of the important band Hootie and the Blowfish.
http://boingboing.net/2015/04/06/rolling-stone-fired-a-writer-o.html