TNR, the NYT and the Myth of the Fact-Checker
I never thought The New Republic was anti-union, but its editor Franklin Foer seems to be auditioning for a Writers Guild strike scab job as a late night comedy writer. How else to explain his telling us that it took four and a half months for his magazine to determine his Iraq correspondent Scott Beauchamp was a liar?
Four and a half months? After having been informed Beauchamp was married to his fact-checker? Yes, I know that’s not proof in and of itself, but it’s a red flag the size of Brooklyn.
You would think Foer would have had the allegations checked out in a couple of weeks at most, given the embarrassment to himself and his publication. (In fact, I wouldn’t doubt he did just that, but was hoping against hope for some kind of bail out. Hence the interminable delay in coming clean.)
Anyway, I could go on to bash Foer yet again and try to deconstruct his convoluted apologia pro vita TNR, but I confess it was so long I only skimmed it, especially after I read that it took the editor until page fourteen finally to admit what we all already knew. In the post-Rather epoch, it’s surprising folks like Foer don’t have the common sense to get in front of problems like this with a quick mea culpa and put an end to things instantly, but hey, I guess there’s no end to human defensiveness.
The larger issue involved, however, is fact-checking in general. It is the linchpin on which mainstream media bases its superiority over blogs and other new online media and has considerable economic ramifications: whom readers trust equals whom advertisers will ultimately invest in. All of this is fluid.
Institutions like the New York Times have an evident vested interest and their editor Bill Keller laid out their case the other day at a lecture in the UK:
First: We believe in a journalism of verification rather than assertion, meaning we put a higher premium on accuracy than on speed or sensation. When we report information, we look hard to see if it stands up to scrutiny. Now, of course, newspapers are written and edited by humans. We get things wrong. The history of our craft is tarnished down the centuries by episodes of partisanship, gullibility, and blind ignorance on the part of major news organisations. (My own paper pretty much decided to overlook the Holocaust as it was happening.) And so there is a corollary to this first principle: when we get it wrong, we correct ourselves as quickly and forthrightly as possible.
At the Times, we are obsessive about owning up to our mistakes, from the petty to the egregious.
My personal experience of mainstream media fact-checking, New York Times included, has not tracked with Keller’s hyperbolic declaration. And as someone whose age has (gasp!) a “6″ in front of it, I have had, alas, decades of fact-checking – at major publishers, movie studios, newspapers, magazines, etc., the vast majority of it long before the blogging era.
In short, mainstream media doesn’t do much. Essays I did for The New York Times Book Review were not fact-checked at all (though they did copy edit, luckily for me). Over at the Los Angeles Times, an amusing example is an article I did on a Siberian film festival at which I was a juror. After I submitted it, the LAT fact-checker called and asked, “Did this all happen?” “Yes,” I said. “Thank you,” she said and hung up. So much for mainstream media fact-checking.
Admittedly, most of what I wrote for newspapers and magazines was in the “cultural” realm, not front-page news, but I wonder about the extent of fact-checking in that seemingly more important area as well. Simple economics makes it dicey. In a fast-moving environment, or even not, the cost of thorough fact-checking is prohibitive, perhaps even to the level of impossibility. What company with a lot of editorial content could afford a sufficient number of qualified fact-checkers and survive?
The difficulties inherent in this became clearer to me when I began to take responsibility at the editorial end of Pajamas Media. You want to fact-check but, if you’re honest, you know you can’t always do so to the degree necessary. You do your best to corroborate stories, but for the most part in the end you “trust your troops” — meaning the reporters (or bloggers) in the field who brought you the material – or you don’t.
We have had problems with this. One night, while I was on duty, we reported the death of Ayatollah Khamenei (based on two sources inside Tehran). Obviously, we were wrong. It was embarrassing, even though, unlike The New Republic, within an hour we were retracting the story and publishing contradicting accounts.
So what’s the solution? Like Keller, most would prefer a journalism of “verification” over “assertion,” but how do we achieve it?
Being honest about biases is part of it, but, in addition, blogging has been shown to be tremendously useful – I could almost say revolutionary – in fact-checking.
While publications can’t afford them, a blog with ten thousand daily readers has an astonishing number of potential fact-checkers, many of them with specific domain knowledge in the particular area of the post or article, again something the MSM can’t begin to afford. I have experienced this on my personal blog where I have been fact-checked vastly more often than in any other medium – and almost always correctly. Indeed, without admitting such, mainstream media have been using blogs for their fact-checking for some time.
Now as some blogs grow and merge into something different – the new media companies of the future – it is important to maintain the responsiveness… and honesty… inherent in this interactive fact-checking.
Mainstream outlets would like to believe these new companies are not emerging. Keller bragged in his lecture about the power of The Times:
As it happens, newspapers have at least two important assets that none of the digital newcomers even pretend to match. One is that we deploy worldwide a corps of trained, skilled reporters to witness events and help our readers understand them. This work is expensive, laborious, sometimes unpopular, and occasionally perilous.
Well, bully. But Mr. Keller apparently did not fact-check. Our little Pajamas Media already has correspondents in nearly fifty countries. They may not all be of the “quality” of The New York Times, but we’re trying our best to improve. Who knows? Maybe we’ll get there some day.
Roger L. Simon is an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter, novelist and blogger, and the CEO of Pajamas Media.
Perhaps in some cases the fact checking of the New York Times is better than that of the thousands of readers of these Pajamas Media blogs. After all, any NYT reporter may have much greater access to other news sources from whom to request verification. They are all already a part of the same club. But, how many verified, fully checked facts does the NYT withhold from it’s readers every issue? How many vitally important facts do the readers of the NYT never see? There are facts exposed on blogs that never reach the pages of the NYT. There are topics that are fully explored on blogs that are barely mentioned in the NYT. The NYT makes the editorial decision of what is news, which facts are pertinent. Bill Keller can argue that the editorial choices made by his professionals at the NYT are all correct. The declining price of NYT stock, the employee layoffs at the NYT, and the continuing lack of profit at the NYT every year argue that Bill Keller doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about.
“First: We believe in a journalism of verification rather than assertion, meaning we put a higher premium on accuracy than on speed or sensation. When we report information, we look hard to see if it stands up to scrutiny.”
The Intelligence Community makes similar claims about the integrity of its analysis process — and is just as fallible in execution of that standard.
The was a question in the CNN/YouBoob Debate hosted by Chauncey Gardiner and his wonderful plants about the whether the candidates believed everything that’s written in the Bible. I was disappointed that none of the candidates replied “I believe more of what’s written in the Bible than what’s printed in the New York Times or, as it’s better known, the anti-Bible.”
As good an example of bad journalism as you’ll find.
TNR wanted to believe Beauchamp was telling the truth, so they ran his articles.
After serious questions were asked about the veracity of his statements — and in one case, were proven to be false — they stonewalled for four months.
Foer finally submitted a 14-page exposition of TNR’s “investigation” of what happened that essentially amounts to him saying “the military wouldn’t allow us to prove the accuracy of stories we ran that we should have checked in the first place.”
Sad. Pathetic. Appalling.
He should be fired.
When I wrote for Readers Digest, virtually every comma was fact checked. If I wrote that something happened on a rainy day, I needed to have meteorological documentation that it did in fact rain on that day. When writing for People magazine, I expect the same rigorous documentation process. At TNR, it sounds as if fact checking is more like, “does it feel right?” My latest on the Fog of Foer:
http://susankatzkeating.blogspot.com/2007/12/fog-of-foer.html
I would give more credibility to a newspaper’s corrections of mistakes if they ran the correction on the same page as they ran the original article. An apology on the middle page of Section D appears disingenuous.
I’m somewhat amused by your coined phrase “post-Rather epoch.” Not even Dan is living in that epoch – he still adamantly claims that somebody in the TANG in 1972 was making memos with MS Word. Now he could be delsuional, he could be stupid, but I believe the most likely explanation is that he believes we are stupid.
As does Franklin Foer. He can’t help it, it’s in the air he breathes, he probably drank it in his mother’s milk. From his elevated perch, everyone not sharing it is stupid.
“Quality” is exactly the right word. If any news gathering and reporting organization is going to be taken seriously, it needs to deliver accuracy. Here’s a look at how to measure a news media outlet’s accuracy (or credibility), and here’s a follow up discussing how a news organization can recover its credibility after failing to deliver accurate reporting.
As for Bill Keller’s “commitment” to verification and accuracy at the New York Times, I’m afraid that will never be credible so long as the organization’s leadership fails to address the legacy of Walter Duranty.
“While publications can’t afford them, a blog with ten thousand daily readers has an astonishing number of potential fact-checkers, many of them with specific domain knowledge in the particular area of the post or article, again something the MSM can’t begin to afford.”
I submit that the MSM has always had a very similar corps of fact-checkers. Their motivations are the same as those of the bloggers: to notify the papers of factual errors, with more or less proper bits of outrage. Their celerity, however, was slower than bloggers – since they had to write letters, or to telephone, to get their fact-checkings into the hands of the editors. And the cost of such letters and calls was greater than some online research, some keyboard clattering and hitting the SEND key.
And I submit that printed journals, who received these comments privately, have over centuries habitually round-filed them. Who’s to know we got it wrong? On to the next big story.
This was precisely the attitude owned by the unconsciously illuminating gent who furnished the name for Pajamas Media, and sneered at bloggers in pajamas while Dan Rather was exposed by bloggers as a fraud or a fool.
It took the MSM a while to realize that online fact-checking is blatantly public, as opposed to their old ignorable phone calls and letters to the editor. In fact MSM is still waking up to this fact, viz. TNR in its breathtakingly dense ‘defense’ of its mendacious Beauchamp.
On that New York Times assertion “when we get it wrong, we correct ourselves as quickly and forthrightly as possible.” — when did the Times disavow the Duranty “there-is-no-famine-in-the-Ukraine” Pulitzer?
I must have missed that issue of the “paper of record.”
“Simple economics makes it dicey.”
Simple economics makes it prohibitively expensive. A media outlet might spend far more for the fact checking than what it does for the author’s actual piece. This was not my main concern regarding the Scott Thomas Beauchamp mess. There is only so much TNR could realistically do before the fact. Franklin Foer goofed up by not taking direct action when it was clearly obvious that Soldier Beauchamp was a liar. This should have been done no later than the end of the first week.
In the interest of being fair and non-partisan, why doesn’t PJM also investigate this NRO / Thomas Smith Jr. emerging scandal, which seems to me to be at least as bad as the Beauchamp thing.
“At the Times, we are obsessive about owning up to our mistakes, from the petty to the egregious.”
Oh, yeah? Well, I have two words for that lying dirt-bomb. Now hear this:
Walter Duranty.
That is all.
MCS desires “… why doesn’t PJM also investigate this NRO / Thomas Smith Jr. emerging scandal, which seems to me to be at least as bad as the Beauchamp thing.”
Well, PJM doesn’t need to. The ‘scandal’ stopped ‘emerging’ when NRO investigated Smith’s piece, found errors, and immediately came clean with facts and apologized. They didn’t dodge and obfuscate for four months.
If you think that’s AT LEAST as bad as the Beauchamp deliberate fictions and TNR’s petulant defenses, it might be worth a stop at the judgement-calibration service for a checkup.
I get the feeling journalists are a bit jealous about “access.” Admittedly, most bloggers don’t have access to Pres. Bush or Vladimir Putin. But they do have eyes and ears, 24/7, in places journalists only visit as outsiders. Example: The whole State Department forced Iraq assignment business. Within days after the Post reported a revolution within the Department, bloggers who were there were able to provide context that was lacking in the original story. Some of these people have served in State their entire adult lives; they know the culture intimately. If a Foreign Service member tells me a) the meeting in question wasn’t as contentious as the Post made it sound and b) most FS people disagree with the supposedly “rebellious” speakers – I tend to believe the Foreign Service guy. Same with military affairs in Iraq. Blogging is a back channel for inside information that the media just can’t match.
Mr. Keller’s statement is oh, so very convenient. His paper is awash in red ink, circulation losses, page-size and staff cuts, and its stock price has halved. If asked, I bet he’d say that this is the result of holding stories until they can be vetted carefully, thus the Holy Times is heroically nailing itself to the cross of accuracy in order to save all the lesser beings from themselves.
It’s just sooooo convenient!
It COULDN’T POSSIBLY be that the world is growing tired of his tired old arrogant institution and time is passing it by. Oh no, perish the thought! It’s just their own high standards that are doing them in.
Just let George Bush try an argument like that on the Times, though (say, about Iraq) and you will not see him get very far.
They. Just. Don’t. Get. It.
Nice piece, though I’m highly skeptical that Mr. Simon has never been fact-checked by his wife.
It’s too bad that you dismiss all mainstream media fact-checking on the basis of two examples from newspapers. I think you’ll find plenty of mainstream publications that offer robust fact-checking. Because of time constraints, they’re more likely to be magazines than newspapers. It’s cost-prohibitive in some cases, but, as the payrolls of dozens of media companies suggest, certainly not always.
As director of fact-checking at Wired Magazine, I can tell you that every story we publish — feature articles, news items, music reviews, infographics, tech product write-ups, etc. — is subject to a thorough review. Fact-checkers contact every source mentioned in the story, ensure that a writer’s interpretation of facts and data is accurate, find new sources when a writer’s are deemed inadequate, recrunch numbers, and, as one poster mentioned, when relevant go to the lengths of checking meteorological information to ensure that a day described as cloudy really was overcast. Et cetera. Other magazines owned by Conde Nast (Wired’s parent company) follow similar practices.
But like everyone else, and despite our best efforts, we make mistakes, and more often than not, it’s our 650,000-plus readers who point them out. Sometimes on blogs, but more often through old-fashioned letters to the editor. They keep us honest, and for that, we’re grateful.
I gave up on the MSM after I realized that, in at least half of the articles I saw on topics where I had knowledge of the topic, there was at least one major factual error. Fact checking? It is to laugh!
Thanks for your comment, Joanna Pearlstein. I certainly realize magazines with longer lead times tend to have better fact-checking then daily newspapers for obvious reasons. Unfortunately, the news that we act upon comes most often from those same newspapers.
As for whether I was extrapolating from two incidents, sorry. I just found those (out of many) amusing.
When it comes to absence of fact-checking, by the way, the Hollywood Studios are extraordinarily lax, at least they were with me. The only thing they have seemed concerned about on feature films I wrote was whether I used a character name that existed in real life in the same city. For example, I had to change the hero of Bustin’ Loose from Joe Boston to Joe Braxton. Aside from that, I’m not sure legal even read any of my scripts before they were produced. (Maybe the should have – but not for legal reasons:))
The wonderful thing about the blogosphere is that everyone is fact checking your butt all the time. It’s a peer-reviewed system. The problem with the MSM is that they have no peers. Just ask them.
My experience is the same as Steve’s, on topics where I had knowledge of the topic there is usually at least one major error.
The funniest comment from the times is that they have reporters all over the world. In Iraq they have reporters all over Baghdad. They rely on stringers who may or may not be Iranian agents for their stories.
Bill Keller said, “My own paper pretty much decided to overlook the Holocaust as it was happening.”
That’s offensively glib.
Ed Driscoll has the perfect complementary story about NY Times accuracy in All The News That’s Fit For Luddites
“Jonathan Last explores how the New York Times covers videogames–in a word, badly.”
One NY Times article. Three bloopers.
Steve wrote, “I gave up on the MSM after I realized that, in at least half of the articles I saw on topics where I had knowledge of the topic, there was at least one major factual error. Fact checking? It is to laugh!”
I first read this on the ‘Net over a decade ago.
“Everything you read in newspapers is absolutely true, except for that rare story of which you happen to have first-hand knowledge.” ~Erwin Knoll
It struck me as obviously true. I found that version at Media Quotes, Journalism Sayings at QuoteGarden.com.
The other quotes they have there are even better. Those from Thomas Jefferson alone are worth the click, but I’ll mention Dave Barry’s there as well to seal the deal.
I urge everyone to read the Bill Keller lecture in the UK that Roger quoted. Steve Boriss at “The Future of News” called it “startling.”
It’s more like a theme park thrill ride. Put down your drinks before reading. Motion sickness medication is recommended.
The sudden charisma loss by his predecessor that gave Bill Keller his current position was due to Jayson Blair.
“In 2003 Keller was made executive editor of the New York Times, replacing Howell Raines, who departed after a scandal about journalistic fraud and plagiarism by reporter Jayson Blair.”
The press in the USA has the protection of the 1st Amendment and shield laws, and no prior restraint. Britain’s press is fettered by the Official Secrets Act and Draconian libel laws.
Keller paints a picture of the US government, all the way up to Bush, begging him not to print a story. Keller printed anyway. If he’d done it in the UK his “feet wouldn’t have touched the ground.”
Now he’s bragging in front of an audience of British journalists. Were they impressed by the “hardships” he labors under in the USA? More likely he really meant it at the end when he declined to answer questions saying “Thankfully I am out of time.”
I like the guy who renamed Foer’s Fog of War (same title as McNamara’s 2003 documentary !) the
Fog of Foer
That would be me… : )
Well, the girl then
Nice shot.
tanstaafl wrote, “Nice shot.”‘
Ditto. Good work Susan.
I originally posted the following comment on Susan’s blog.
The transcript of Foer’s conversations with Beauchamp makes a lot more sense once you realize that “unintelligible” is code for Foer cursing under his breath.
Snapping Turtle has some good excerpts to read that way. The conversation really comes alive.
Susan replied “Looking Glass, thanks for the link. I got a good laugh out of that.”
See what happens when you encourage us, Susan?
Thanks, lads – much appreciated! BTW, I figured out the whole married-in-the-lawyers’-office thing. The office must have been on a boat in the Bull Run Marina, making the lawyer a ship’s captain and thereby able to perform marriages. The rest of the Foer Fog remains mired in murk, though…
Michael Kinsley once wrote a piece about encountering one of the legendary New Yorker fact-checkers. After regaling everyone at the party with the expected stories, the guy asked Kinsley what fact-checking they had at the New Republic. Kinsley said, “You’re looking at it.” The bewildered checker said that, if something was in the New Republic, he always took that as confirmation.
A cautionary tale, then and now.