MSNBC’s Geist: ‘Jaw-dropping’ Rolling Stone Writer Kept Job

On Monday’s “Morning Joe” on MSNBC, co-host Willie Geist questioned the reaction of Rolling Stone magazine’s management to a Columbia Journalism Review “autopsy” of its November 2014 story of a University of Virginia rape allegation against a fraternity that may have been completely fabricated.

According to Geist, with Rolling Stone having to had completely retract the story, it was “jaw-dropping” that the story’s author, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, along with other editors, were allowed to keep their jobs.

“Given this autopsy it’s jaw-dropping that she keeps her job,” Geist said. “And I think we have to ask, this – how this happened exactly? Because i don’t think these are mistakes. This is an experienced reporter who knows you don’t take a single source at her word on a story this serious.”

“I don’t know if somebody had an agenda, whatever it was, but the reporter, a cub reporter knows you call somebody else,” he continued. “You check the story once. You check it twice. you don’t take a single source on the story and those three friends of Jackie who the alleged victim called in the piece, they are quoted in the article, and the quotes come from Jackie, and this reporter never called the three friends to verify very simply the quotes and if she called us we would have told her we never said that.”

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