Two weeks ago, The Sydney Morning Herald ran a story by one of its most high-profile columnists, Paul Sheehan, which it promoted on its front page — “Rape Shame: The Untold Story”.

It was based on claims by a woman who went by the pseudonym “Louise”.

She claimed to be a nurse and said that in August 2002, after completing back-to-back shifts at St Vincent’s and Sydney Hospitals, she was raped multiple times and in multiple ways by a gang of six men she described as Arabic. In addition to the sexual assaults, she claimed to have suffered 79 broken bones.

She further claimed that when she tried to report this to the police, the duty officer to whom she spoke was not interested.

Sheehan and the newspaper accepted all this at face value.

Within 24 hours, “Louise” was revealed as having fabricated the whole story.

How on earth did a senior journalist on a major metropolitan newspaper – and the newspaper itself – get this so wrong?

It seems to me that the causes lay in a combination of human frailty, weak editorial procedures, and a culture of recklessness and irresponsibility inside the newspaper.

Human frailty first, and here I must declare an interest. Paul Sheehan was chief of staff (chief reporter) of the Herald in the early 1980s when I was the paper’s chief sub-editor. The relationship between these two key editorial executive positions was central to the good running of the paper, and our relationship was strong.

I don’t agree with much of what he writes nowadays, but I retain respect for him as a person, and some of the best aspects of his character – candour and courage – have been on display since the catastrophe of “Louise”.

He fronted up boldly for his egregious failure to verify “Louise’s” story, which even the most perfunctory checks with the police and the hospitals would have revealed as a fake.

What will probably save Sheehan from the sack is that he himself did not make up the story . . . His was a failure to verify. That was incompetent and irresponsible, but it was not dishonest.

But he has taken the fall for the newspaper, too. He has said – rightly – that as a senior writer, he is given more latitude than less senior staff, and that he let the paper down.

That’s true as far as it goes, but it goes nowhere near far enough, and as a consequence it leaves him carrying an unfair share of the burden.

A human frailty shared by us all is a susceptibility to accept stereotypes as a reliable basis for making sense of the world beyond our personal experience. They exert a powerful influence. As Walter Lippman observed nearly a century ago: “They may not be a complete picture of the world, but they are a picture of a possible world to which we are adapted . . .  No wonder, then, that any disturbance of the stereotypes seems like an attack on the foundations of the universe.”

Circumstances suggest that this was a factor here.

First, it was almost exactly 30 years since the abduction, rape and murder of Anita Cobby, a nurse who was attacked by five men on her way home from work in western Sydney on the evening of February 2, 1986. The Sydney media recalled this at the time of the anniversary a couple of weeks before the “Louise” story appeared, and this will have refreshed the city’s collective memory.

Just to be clear, incidentally, the five men convicted of that dreadful crime were neither Arabic nor Muslim.

Second, in the intervening years a stereotype has developed in Sydney of Arabic or Muslim men as disrespectful of, and a threat to, non-Muslim women.

These events and stereotypes leave a receptive impression on a community’s mental retina, so when a resemblance appears, it sounds plausible. People let their guard down: they are inclined to believe it is true.

Third, Sheehan has written extensively from a conservative perspective on issues concerning immigration.

In 1998, he wrote a book called Among the Barbarians. There, his central thesis was that the Australian national identity was being undermined by the effects of a left-liberal immigration policy that had resulted in the settlement of large numbers of immigrants from backgrounds very dissimilar to those of the Australian majority.

A few years later, he wrote another book, Girls Like You, about what he called an epidemic of rapes in Sydney in the early 2000s.

So Sheehan is not only a very senior journalist with a long history at the Herald, but has a profile inside and outside the paper as something of an authority on these matters.

Fourth, as a matter of practical reality, in newsrooms where assessments and decisions about stories are made at the rate of hundreds a day, a story that reinforces a stereotype, written by a person with some authority on the subject, is less likely to be questioned than one that challenges the stereotype.

However, if succumbing to a stereotype were the only failure of the Herald’s editorial processes, it would be bad enough, but there were clearly others. This is where I believe weak editorial procedures made their contribution.

A major systemic failure – one that has become endemic in newspapers generally – is the mashing of reportage with commentary.

The “Louise” story was presented by the paper as a commentary by a columnist but it was actually in large part a news story, promoted as such on its front page.

Commentaries are opinion. So long as the facts are right – and usually they are already well-established – commentators are more or less free to say what they like.

The rules for news stories are different. News stories are fundamentally about facts and explanation. The facts are meant to be verified by the reporter and, in well-run newspapers, are subject to several layers of checking by sub-editors and editorial executives.

It is well known that the Fairfax newspapers have drastically thinned their sub-editing capability, but self-evidently whoever now runs the remnant checking procedures at the Herald treated the Sheehan piece as commentary, and so proper verification procedures that would normally apply to a news story were not followed.

If they had been followed, someone in the news hierarchy would have asked Sheehan what the police or the hospitals had to say about the claims. If the answer was that he didn’t know, he would have been told to find out and put it in the copy.

The final piece in this ugly jigsaw concerns internal culture. We got a glimpse of the Herald’s internal culture during the Joe Hockey defamation proceedings last year.

In his judgment in that case, Justice White referred to a series of emails written by the editor-in-chief of the Herald, Darren Goodsir. In one of these, Goodsir wrote to a reporter: “. . . given what Andrew [Holden, then editor-in-chief of The Age] and I endured last week with Hockey, I want to have this nailed to the cross in more ways than one”.

This and other sentences in the email, as well as the headline over the article at the centre of the controversy, led Justice White to conclude that Goodsir bore animus towards Hockey and that the publication of the articles complained of had been “predominantly actuated by that improper purpose”.

Accordingly, Justice White found that Goodsir and the Herald itself had been motivated by malice.

That such emails were written at all is evidence of a culture of recklessness. Moreover, that a newspaper of the Herald’s stature would set out to “get at” Hockey, to quote Justice White’s judgment, suggests a culture tainted by irresponsibility.

Recklessness and irresponsibility were on prominent display in the “Louise” case.

What will probably save Sheehan from the sack is that he himself did not make up the story; “Louise” did. His was a failure to verify.

That was incompetent and irresponsible, but it was not dishonest. And it is dishonesty that usually gets journalists the sack: making stories up, plagiarism, conflicts of interest.

The Herald’s senior management and Goodsir have a somewhat larger case to answer. It is they who are responsible for the culture, for the editorial procedures that leave the paper exposed to the risks that were made real in the “Louise” story, and for the consequent harm done to the community of Sydney — and the Muslim community in particular — by this damaging misinformation.

That Goodsir survived the findings in the Hockey case says a great deal about the standards of conduct the Fairfax board and senior management are prepared to tolerate in their editors.

Sheehan has taken the fall publicly but a heavier burden of blame belongs elsewhere.

FOOTNOTE: Paul Sheehan has since been suspended indefinitely by the Herald following an internal investigation. You can read the statement of Herald editor-in-chief Darren Goodsir here.

► Dr Denis Muller is a long-time journalist and leading expert on media ethics. He is a Fellow at the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Advancing Journalism.