No one at Rolling Stone apparently found it curious that Erdely stumbled upon festering rape scandals at the 3 institutions that comprise the trifecta of left-wing hate objects—organized religion, the US military, and that bastion of male privilege, fraternities

Someone once said that you will always find what you're looking for if you look hard enough.  If no one said it, let me be the first.  The Rolling Stone article on the UVA rape hoax is a perfect example because the author, Erdely, has a perfect record of finding rape stories where the Left wants to find them.

The negligent party here is Coco McPherson, Rolling Stone’s chief fact-checker. From Columbia’s report: “McPherson read the final draft. This was a provocative, complex story heavily reliant on a single source. She said later that she had faith in everyone involved and didn’t see the need to raise any issues with the editors.”

She had faith in everyone involved. That’s code for “the story felt right.” It felt right because McPherson shared Erdely’s prejudices that fraternities are hives of sexual violence and Women Don’t Lie™.

Couldn’t they have gotten someone else to fact-check the piece? Someone who might, I don’t know, have checked some of the facts? I think a conservative might have done a better job of it, though not because conservatives don’t also suffer from confirmation bias. Everyone does. That being said, it doesn’t require a person with no blind spots at all to point out the holes in this story; it merely requires someone who doesn’t share the author’s.

Yet no one fitting that description could be found at Rolling Stone or most other publications for that matter—the Atlantic, the New Yorker, the New York Times, etc. And that’s the way they like it. The people who run big name media outlets, with few exceptions, have the same ideological bent. Holding all the most fashionable opinions is the price of admission to this hermetically sealed world. It actively resists change to the extent that even the embarrassing “Rape on Campus” debacle won’t precipitate a shakeup at Rolling Stone or even a reevaluation of policies and practices.