Last November, Rolling Stone published a piece detailing one UVA student’s horrific and graphic account of being brutally gang raped by members of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity. The story caused protests at UVA, led to the suspension of all UVA fraternities and ignited a nationwide debate about the prevalence of rape on college campuses.

But within weeks, the story began to fall apart. Phi Kappa Psi did not hold a party on the night mentioned in the piece, and no fraternity members matched descriptions provided by the story’s only source, the alleged rape victim known only as “Jackie.”

Six months later, The Columbia School of Journalism released a report that Rolling Stone commissioned detailing exactly what went wrong in the piece. The report reveals that Rolling Stone’s journalistic failures were significant and widespread, and that the magazine neglected even the most basic fact-checking procedures.

Maybe the most glaring and inexcusable aspect of this Rolling Stone fiasco is the way they regard the situation as just a bump in the road, a glitch in an otherwise perfectly sound system, without taking the gravity of their mistakes seriously. The managing editor laughs on public radio, albeit perhaps a nervous tic, while looking back on the staff’s treatment of this article, and the publication as a whole makes no revisions to their process and determines no consequences or discipline for those responsible.

Across the country, news organizations, journalists and those involved in media ethics widely spoke out against Rolling Stone’s inaction. Rolling Stone staff may not be facing the consequences of their mistakes, but others are. The fraternity in the piece, Phi Kappa Psi, faced significant backlash after the article’s release and plans to pursue legal action against the magazine for libel.

Rolling Stone’s failure to make significant changes following their failure depletes not only their own credibility, but the credibility of every other news organization. Rolling Stone’s inability to execute elementary fact-checking procedures opens every news story up to critique. The factual flaws in “A Rape on Campus” were only exposed because of how high profile the piece was. What other inaccuracies have the editors of Rolling Stone missed?

The most important consequence, one that Rolling Stone largely fails to acknowledge, is the blow dealt to the credibility of sexual assault survivors and to the very important issue of rape on college campuses. Rolling Stone’s travesty of an editorial process doesn’t just undermine their own credibility. It undermines the credibility of courageous rape or assault victims that come forth to share their own hardships and to seek justice for the wrongs committed against them. They are already subjected to intense scrutiny with every statement they make, but Rolling Stone’s breach of long-standing journalistic codes only worsens the process of attempting for justice for victims of sexual assault as they are needlessly written off as unreliable or even hysteric.

Like it or not, Rolling Stone’s journalistic breach affects every single student at Harker. Whether in one year or four, each of us will matriculate into some form of a college campus, a campus where rape victims will lack credibility. College culture is already a harsh environment for rape victims, but Rolling Stone’s carelessness has cast it reprehensibly backwards.

This piece was originally published in the pages of The Winged Post on April 22, 2015.