In a roundup last week, Jon Stewart offered up a list of Black men from around the country who had been killed by police in the last year. Unfortunately, one of the men wasn’t shot or strangled; he was Tasered while high and attempting to assault a sheriff. The medical examiner ruled he’d died of a drug overdose. Stewart apologized for the error.

(Added 6/29/20: Alas, Comedy Central has removed the video; this is a video about the video.)

SorryWatch analysis: Well done. Stewart says he’s sorry (repeatedly) and takes responsibility (probably more than strictly necessary, since he has writers and may not have actually written the joke…but he didn’t default to the annoying “My STAFF is responsible, but I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN, because it happened ON MY WATCH [noble sigh], and even though AS I MAY HAVE MENTIONED IT WASN’T ME, the buck still stops with me” thing). He makes things right not only by apologizing, but also by airing this segment correcting the mistake. Stewart is entitled to rage that his error caused his larger point — that Black men are all-too-frequently victims of unjust treatment and undue force by law enforcement — to be discredited by the likes of Fox News (Nuntii vulpus). Which is exactly what happened. Even in his ire and forehead-slapping, he’s still being funny — that’s his job — but as with all his injustice-themed segments, there is a jagged edge.

By the way, Michael Ramos, the San Bernadino County D.A. in the incident that Stewart wrongly attributed to police brutality, accepted Stewart’s apology. But he reiterated his major talking point: “I respectfully agree to disagree with [Stewart] on what the big picture is. Like I’ve been saying all along, it’s that police officers put their lives on the line every day. They have one of the most dangerous jobs in America … and that’s the conversation that needs to happen.” Well then! Everyone is on message!

Let’s compare this to Rolling Stone’s apology for the bombshell rape piece that turned out to be, shall we say, flawed (HAHAHAHAHAHAHA/wipes away bitter tears). The Washington Post has pretty much owned the reporting on RS’s fuckups, so go there for the details, but the quick version: After discrepancies in the victim’s story came to light, Rolling Stone ran an apology that appeared to blame the victim, the pseudonymously named Jackie. “There now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie’s account,” wrote the magazine’s managing editor, Will Dana, in an online note: “We have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced.” Way to blame a traumatized teenager, as many folks pointed out.

RS quickly amended the note (without telling readers that the wording had been changed, a journalistic no-no), saying that “we have come to the conclusion that we were mistaken in honoring Jackie’s request to not contact the alleged assaulters to get their account.” It went on, “In trying to be sensitive to the unfair shame and humiliation many women feel after a sexual assault, we made a judgment – the kind of judgment reporters and editors make every day. We should have not made this agreement with Jackie and we should have worked harder to convince her that the truth would have been better served by getting the other side of the story. These mistakes are on Rolling Stone, not on Jackie. We apologize to anyone who was affected by the story and we will continue to investigate the events of that evening.”

Better. But not good, and not complete. RS should have enumerated the sheer breadth and depth and height of its idiotic mistakes. The Post’s Erik Wemple has a good roundup of how extensive they were — basically, they were the Journalism 101 equivalent of bellowing proudly about your strawberry shortcakes and then falling down the stairs and winding up with them all over your face. (Please click on that.) The Wemple piece, which spells out every single error, some breathtaking, is a must-read. Not only did the magazine make no effort to source the basic facts in vast swaths of narrative, it may have lied about attempting to contact witnesses and participants.

Using anonymous sources isn’t always bad. But when you’re dealing with a bombshell story, as RS clearly knew it was, to make NO attempt to ascertain facts that could be easily confirmed made the whole edifice of the narrative suspect. Worse, RS’s failings (which wouldn’t have passed muster in Mrs. Aronson’s 4th grade class in how to write a research paper) gave juicy fodder to Sorkinian-Cosbyite dickwads who think women go around lying and kvetching willy-nilly after our incessant drunken asking-for-it red-cup-waving short-skirt-wearing sexy-dancing male-tears-in-a-shot-glass-shooting lurchfests which we follow up with sinfully self-indulgent recreational abortions and cake.

Stewart blamed himself for providing ammo to those eager to prove that Ferguson was a one-off or that police are demonized, or that Black people are animals who essentially FORCE the police to strangle them even if they are unarmed and pleading and not breathing. RS, on the other hand, first blamed Jackie, then sorta took responsibility but hid behind faux-sensitivity to Jackie. Stewart named his mistake; Rolling Stone has yet to name its many mistakes. Dana did some super-terse tweeting but has been silent on Twitter since Dec 5.

Uh, how ’bout you maybe ELUCIDATE that a smidge.

A terrific piece by Maya Dusenbery, a former Mother Jones fact checker, does. She points out that even in the revised apology, Dana seems to blame the magazine only for being too darn sensitive to the needs of a rape victim. Which is bullshit. Especially if Jackie had had, as the Post reported, expressed second thoughts during the RS interview process and begged the reporter not to profile her (and for RS to go forward anyway, which would as Dusenbery points out be a clear violation of ethical journalism guidelines). As Dusenbery points out, “If Rolling Stone was so eager to keep Jackie’s story in the piece that they were ready to run it against her will, that suggests their willingness to bend their fact-checking standards may have had less to do with some feminist ‘sensitivity’ to a survivor’s request and more to do with not wanting to risk losing a particularly shocking tale of a gang rape that would help their article go viral in the way it ultimately did.” Yep.

Stewart made one small dumb mistake, owned it, apologized well. Rolling Stone made a series of massive moronic mistakes, compounded them, and has thus far owned none of them. The editorial mass exodus that unfortunately happened at The New Republic this week SHOULD happen at Rolling Stone. They’ve hurt journalism, they’ve hurt truth, they’ve hurt rape victims, they’ve hurt all women who are already accustomed to not being believed when they tell of their experiences of microaggressions, outright harassment, assault and rape. Go away, current Rolling Stone senior editorial masthead. You are the Sesame Street baker of journalism.