Yesterday, I pointed out that Garry Trudeau is hilariously late on the Rolling Stone UVA rape story—so hilariously late that he published a strip excoriating a "frat boy monster" that subsequent reporting has almost definitively proven NEVER EXISTED. I joked that he could've at least added a panel pointing out that, yes, the specific story that anchored Rolling Stone's incredibly inaccurate and horribly reported piece was wrong, "but THE NARRATIVE is so important that blabbity blah blah"? So how did he respond to being told that his strip is premised on a lie?
"Jackie’s story was not the focus, only the setup for commentary on institutional conflict of interest in adjudicating sexual assault, an issue that did not disappear with the credibility of the article," Trudeau told Betsy Woodruff over at Slate. "We had some internal discussion about whether the flaws in the [Rolling Stone] reporting mattered here, and we concluded they didn’t. ... U-Va. is only used as setup to get the reader to consider the larger problem of institutions prioritizing their reputations over the welfare of those they’re charged with safeguarding," he told Michael Cavna at the Washington Post.
In other words: "THE NARRATIVE is so important that blabbity blah blah."
Trudeau says that Jackie's story—the "flaws in the [Rolling Stone] reporting," lol—doesn't really matter. But this is so transparently false it's laughable. Because without Jackie's story—without the utterly fabricated assertion that she had been gang-raped by a pack of frat boys, one of whom later taunted her on grounds by saying "hi" and "I had a good time"—there would've been no national outrage. There wouldn't have been weeks of coverage of the story on MSNBC. There wouldn't have been dozens of journalists signaling to their peers how smart they are by retweeting and sharing the horribly reported, hugely inaccurate Rolling Stone piece. Instead of a national outrage, there would've been just another piece of narrative hackwork founded on shockingly bad statistical work that would've come and gone. After a half-day of murmuring on Twitter, it would've disappeared into the ether. So Jackie's story obviously mattered. Without Jackie's story, Garry Trudeau would've never written his strip.
The only conclusion one can reach here is that Garry Trudeau thinks that it's okay to lie in the service of a grander narrative. He thinks that it's fine to pass along falsehoods—gross, libelous falsehoods aimed at people and institutions who have done nothing to deserve being libeled in such a manner—in order to get a Very Important Point across to the drooling masses who aren't as smart as he. Garry Trudeau thinks it's okay to shock the conscience with a lie because that's what it takes to get people out of their stupor.
Because "The Narrative." And who cares if the narrative itself is complete and utter BS?