More from McArdle's column:

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A network spokesman declined to comment on NBC’s editorial process. But on Saturday, Kate Snow, who did the Oct. 1 interview with Swetnick, tweetedan explanation for the delay: “By the time we were able to find the woman independently from Mr. Avenatti, who declined to give us her full legal name and phone number, and fully report and vet her story, the Kavanaugh confirmation process was over and the news value was limited.”

Frankly, the explanation doesn’t make sense. 

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So once more: What was NBC thinking? The conservative theory is that the network, by withholding important information, was trying to help Democrats derail Kavanaugh’s nomination. But there’s a less malevolent explanation, which is simply that news organizations are leery of ever questioning the credibility of a sexual-assault accusation.

That’s understandable. A skeptical response to rape allegations risks re-victimizing someone who has already been brutally violated. It also makes punishing attackers more difficult, leaving them free to assault again. That’s why activists are so adamant that we “believe women” and why they savage anyone who questions an accuser’s reliability. Which only heightens the news media’s reluctance to say “something’s not right here.”

When Rolling Stone magazine in 2014 published an account of a gang rape at the University of Virginia, some reporters, including me, nursed private doubts about its too-cinematic details — but, like me, they were exceedingly wary of publicly casting doubt.

Even after Richard Bradley, the editor of Worth magazine, finally raisedquestions about Rolling Stone’s account on his personal blog, even the writers who declined to attack him for “blaming the victim” treated them gingerly. A lot more reporting was required before we were willing to state outright what we’d suspected privately — that “Jackie,” the alleged victim, had made the whole thing up.

It would, of course, be much simpler if women never lied about rape. Their stories wouldn’t need to be interrogated, no sifting and sorting of the facts in a crime that is notoriously hard to prosecute.

But we know that’s not possible. High-profile false rape accusations such as the ones in the Rolling Stone article reflect the reality that between 2 and 10 percent of rape allegations are provably false; the FBI says 8 percent of forcible-rape allegations are “unfounded.” The number of false accusations that can’t be proved false necessarily pushes that number even higher. To act as if this weren’t the case borders on wishful thinking, and it comes at a cost.

NBC wasn’t the only media outlet that seems to have relaxed its normal standards during the Kavanaugh hearings. The New Yorker, with exceptionally weak evidence, ran allegations of his sexual misbehavior in college. The reporters no doubt believed they were making it easier for victims to be heard. But airing insufficiently vetted allegations encourages the public to distrust the media. Actual victims won’t be heard if no one’s listening.

Some more on Megan McArdle, with whose work I am not familiar, to make of what you will:

her wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megan_McArdle

From her wikipedia entry: David Brooks in 2012 called her one of the most influential bloggers on the right, describing her as someone who starts from a libertarian perspective but is non-doctrinaire in how she applies those beliefs.  She worked as a canvasser for the Nader formed Public Interest Research Groups and said of it that it was "the most, deceptive, evil place I've ever worked."  Also that that experience hurried along her transition from ultraliberal to libertarian.

One Alex Nichols, in this September 2017 piece for a publication called The Outline, is not a fan of her work:  https://theoutline.com/post/2303/megan-mcardle-has-a-lot-of-bad-ideas?zd...

I feel just little nervous when I see someone purporting to be John Bolton at her Halloween pic twitter post today acting as though he gets on at least ok with her: https://theoutline.com/post/2303/megan-mcardle-has-a-lot-of-bad-ideas?zd... (scroll down to around the 10th or 15th reply)  Maybe once you get to know him away from his day job of working to start a nuclear war, John Bolton is just the life of every party and a swell guy to hang with.

With a WaPo column she has megaphone.

If Avenatti takes issue with any of the assertions in the piece she wrote today I don't get the sense he will be a shrinking violet when it comes to publicly challenging it.