The press's reluctance to let go of a popular but debunked meme — in this case, the nonexistent "epidemic" of college campus sexual assaults — is sometimes inadvertently humorous, though still intensely annoying.
Take how John Bacon and Marisol Bello at USA Today characterized the news that "Police in Charlottesville were unable to verify that an alleged sexual assault detailed in a controversial Rolling Stone magazine article ever took place at the University of Virginia":
In her October 21 article, "White supremacists target middle America," USA Today's Marisol Bello took a look at how hate groups are trying to go more "mainstream" by ditching Nazi armbands, brown shirts and white sheets and going for a more "middle class" look. While there is merit in covering such a story, Bello and/or her editors unfortunately chose to color the piece in a way that reflected negatively on the GOP by featuring with the article the photo shown at right with this caption:
Derek Black, left, gets help from his father, Don, on his Internet radio show Sunday in Lake Worth Fla. Don Black is a former Ku Klux Klan leader, and Derek holds a seat on the Palm Beach County, Fla., GOP committee.
The photo and caption appear above the headline on USA Today's online edition. Yet the Blacks were just two of numerous white supremacists featured in the story and it took Bello until paragraph 26 out of 28 to note that the Palm Beach GOP is "trying to unseat him [Derek Black] after learning of his white supremacist ties."