Free Republic

Rolling Stone screwed up. In most media scandals, it's unfair to paint with such a broad brush. When Stephen Glass concocted his fables at the New Republic, he went to antiheroic lengths to conceal his deceptions from his colleagues. Janet Cooke, who famously won a Pulitzer for her Washington Post series about an 8-year-old heroin addict, "Jimmy's World," lied to her editors. That's not the case with Rolling Stone's publication of "A Rape on Campus," the story of the brutal gang rape of a student named "Jackie" at the University of Virginia that turned out to be false. Its failure...

WASHINGTON -- Surviving the deadliest shooting massacre in U.S. history wasn't enough to make Colin Goddard an advocate for stricter gun laws. Only when he watched another rampage play out on TV two years later did the Virginia Tech graduate realize he had to speak out. "That took me back to the day like none other," Goddard said of another troubled gunman who killed 14 at an immigration center in Binghamton, N.Y. "I was watching the body count rise and I was like, this is just the same stuff that is happening to another family now. ... I was like,...

Gov. Bob Wise on Monday demanded an apology from the University of Virginia because a pep band lampooned his state's rural image during the halftime show of a college football bowl game. Saturday's Continental Tire Bowl pitted the University of Virginia against West Virginia University. At halftime, Virginia's student-run pep band staged a parody of The Bachelor," with a male Virginia student choosing between two female contestants. The contestant said to be from West Virginia wore blue overalls and pigtails, had a talent for square dancing and declared a dream to move to Beverly Hills, Calif. -- a reference to...