The Free Beacon’s Lachlan Markay joined RedState’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Friends, where Bill McMorris is a fixture.
Topics included Rand Paul’s announcement, the fallout surrounding Rolling Stone, and the brutal Walter Scott shooting.
Markay started in discussing the first 24 hours of Rand Paul’s presidential announcement, and defended Paul’s answer on his abortion stance. Markay also said he thought that the first 24 hours have gone as well as they could have.
When host Leon Wolf asked McMorris about the fallout surrounding Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s Rolling Stone piece on rape victim "Jackie" that has since been debunked.
McMorris said Rolling Stone publishes feature pieces, and that the standards are normally different than those of beat reporters at other publications.
McMorris said that as a feature writer, you have to be grounded in reality. He highlighted a few of Erdely’s other writings, which McMorris described as "bad fiction you can’t sell to a dime-store novel publisher."
McMorris said he was surprised that in an Internet-rich culture that it took so long for Erdely and Rolling Stone to get caught for lying.
Markay said we live in a culture that is entrenched in a "trigger warning" and rape culture craze. He said that there is a mindset that journalists are not allowed to press rape victims about their experiences because it could devalue their experiences.
The panel closed with a discussion of the dashboard camera and witness videos of the Walter Scott shooting, which turned into a discussion about the use of physical force, and what that means for the future of women in the force. McMorris said that standards have already been lowered for firefighters in New York, and that he expects standards to continue to fall across the board.