Ed Helms Kills Rolling Stone Magazine Dead During UVA Commencement Speech

Full Speech:

Huff Po - “Never let others define you, define yourselves.”

So began a seemingly comedic speech at the University of Virginia’s Valedictory Exercises by actor Ed Helms on Friday. In front of a large audience, the comedian peppered in jokes about Netflix and student loans before turning a harsh eye on the Rolling Stone rape story scandal, which has drawn widespread condemnation and lawsuits against the magazine.

“It has been said that a rolling stone gathers no moss,” Helms said. “I would add that sometimes a rolling stone also gathers no verifiable facts or even the tiniest morsels of journalistic integrity.”

“Rolling Stone tried to define you this year,” Helms said. “As a result, not only was this community thrown deep into turmoil, but the incredibly important struggle to address sexual violence on campuses nationwide was suddenly more confusing than ever and needlessly set back.”

The speech comes a month after Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism called Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s story “A Rape on Campus” a “journalistic failure” — a move that prompted Rolling Stone to retract the entire piece.

“The failure encompassed reporting, editing, editorial supervision and fact-checking,” the authors of the review said.

“This community didn’t fall for the fallacy that just because Rolling Stone was wrong everything here must be perfectly peachy,” he continued. “You all had the courage to understand you can be outraged at Rolling Stone and still ask yourselves hard questions: When sexual violence does occur in our community, do we have the best possible protocols and resources available to our students? And UVA is charging forward to answer those questions and you should be proud of that.”

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Andy Bernard! What a mic-drop moment that was. Should have just packed up and left after that one line to be honest. “It has been said that a rolling stone gathers no moss…I would add that sometimes a rolling stone also gathers no verifiable facts or even the tiniest morsels of journalistic integrity.” So perfect. Yeah maybe the rest of the speech was important about not labeling things or defining things prematurely, but sometimes you just gotta pull a Costanza and know when it’s time to leave on the highest of high notes. Fuck Rolling Stone.