So the Rolling Stone gang-rape story, lauded and celebrated by so many in academic and journalism circles when it came out last November with words like ‘groundbreaking’, ‘important’, etc. has fizzled like a wet firecracker.

While it was expected that radical feminists would continue to engage in hysterical hyperbole and hype the ‘culture of rape’ or ‘rape epidemic’ narrative, it was depressing to see how many smart, reputable journalists got taken in by the story when it first came out. It is apparent they wanted the story of a female University of Virginia student getting brutally gang raped by several men in a frat house to be true, because it confirmed their own biases.

White privilege? Check. Out of control frat-house males? Check. And so on.

Hopefully for many journalists and academics, the collapse of the Rolling Stone gang-rape story will serve to give them pause and perhaps just a little introspection before they jump on the bandwagon in the future. Oh, and a little fact checking would be nice. Jeez, I mean, c’mon! Remember the old saying: ‘If your mother tells you she loves you, check it.’

What of the radical feminists, the ones who were all-in because the story confirmed all of their biases? The fact that the UVA gang-rape story has fallen apart is of little or no concern to them. That’s because no amount of countervailing facts can persuade them because mere facts are nothing in comparison to their contrived ivory tower theories that undergird their cramped, provincial views. No, they’ll keep chuggin’ along as if nothing had happened.

But you journalists who allowed yourselves to be taken in: you need to decide if you’re going to be a journalist or an advocate – as the Rolling Stone gang rape story debacle demonstrates, you can’t be both.

UPDATE, Monday 12-15-14 at 7:16 PM PST: Christina Hoff Sommers, a.k.a., the ‘Factual Feminist’, has a revealing account of how in 2010 a left-leaning institution teamed up with reporters from NPR and produced a study called ‘Sexual Assault on Campus’. In Sommers’ words:

The report is the worst kind of advocacy research, it’s full of anecdotes and misleading statistics – it’s predicated on the claim that 1 in 5 female students can expect to be a victim of rape or attempted rape – I  mean these investigative journalists never thought to investigate what serious researchers and criminologists have exposed as a specious statistic.