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.
