Welcome to the Golden Age of Fact-Checking
What the Jonah Lehrer debacle reveals about the state of journalism today
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GoogleFor the last several years, the universe has been kicking journalists. In 2012, they started kicking themselves. There was Jonah Lehrer and his fake Dylan quotes. There was Fareed Zakaria and his purloined paragraph. There was a series of other offenses, so many that the Poynter Institute’s Craig Silverman ultimately dubbed these last few months journalism’s “summer of sin.” It was happening, many suggested, at least in part because journalism’s traditional quality control mechanisms were in deep institutional decline; the fact-checkers had left the building.
At The New York Times, columnist David Carr invoked that bygone era when wayward cub reporters learned the finer points of news media ethics via “come-to-Jesus moments” where editors “put them up against a wall and tattooed a message deep into their skull: show respect for the fundamentals of the craft, or you would soon not be part of it.”
At Slate, New York University journalism professor Charles Seife, who reviewed 18 of Jonah Lehrer’s Wired.com blog posts and identified issues in 17 of them, concluded that Lehrer’s transgressions were “inexcusable,” but also that the news industry shared “some of the blame for his failure” because it no longer subjects its novices to “layers upon layers of editors, top editors, copy editors, fact checkers and even (heaven help us!) subeditors before a single word [gets] published.”
At Big Think, David Berreby called Lehrer “the product of a business model that is good for media corporations and bad for you, the media consumer,” and suggested that today’s news outlets have largely abandoned journalism’s “supporting machinery,” thus creating a climate where “the temptation to cheat will get to be too much for some people.”
But the “summer of sin” didn’t happen because fact-checking doesn’t take place as much as it once did. It happened because fact-checking got democratized. True, it now largely occurs at a different and potentially problematic point in the process—after an article has been published. But fact-checking also happens far more transparently than it once did, and overall, it occurs more frequently too. Now, a single reader in his home office can do in 15 minutes what it might have taken the New Yorker’s entire squadron of legendary fact-checkers days to accomplish in, say, 1992.
Take Jonah Lehrer’s books. After reading Reason contributing editor Michael C. Moynihan’s story in Tablet about how Lehrer had fabricated Bob Dylan quotes in Imagine, I decided to take a look at the book myself. In the midst of its second chapter, I came across a paragraph that felt oddly familiar: It seemed to be a paraphrase of a paragraph that I had written in a piece about Post-It Notes that I’d published in 2005 at a now-defunct magazine called The Rake. Then, I realized that while Lehrer quotes Post-It Notes inventor Art Fry three times in Imagine, he didn’t include any sources for these quotes in the book’s Notes section, nor did he mention that he’d interviewed Fry. (In multiple other instances in Imagine, Lehrer includes a citation in the Notes section when he interviews someone first-hand.) Ultimately, I realized that one of the quotes was quite similar to one that appears in my piece, and another one was identical to one that appears in a Wired article from 2008 that Lehrer did not write.
When I emailed Lehrer to ask him about the provenance of these quotes, he didn’t directly reply to me. Instead, Andrew Wylie, his agent, contacted me, and explained that Lehrer had interviewed Art Fry in 2008 and that Lehrer had “no memory” of ever reading my article. (Wylie also stated that the Wired piece had not been properly cited in the book.) In a follow-up email, Wylie said that Lehrer would be happy to cite my article in a corrected version of Imagine but repeated the assertion that Lehrer had “no memory” of reading it.
This and other aspects of the exchange seemed less than straightforward to me, and made me wonder exactly how inclined Lehrer was to the sort of fabrications Moynihan had discovered. In an effort to assess this, I started reading both Imagine and How We Decide. What I found was similar to what Seife found. Throughout both books, there are instances where Lehrer alters quotes, exaggerates statistics, omits key details that appears in his source materials, or otherwise commits journalistic misdemeanors.
What also struck me was how rich an information environment the Web has evolved into over the last decade or so. In December 2001, when Ken Layne famously declared, “It’s 2001, and we can Fact Check your ass,” hundreds of news media outlets had come online and it was becoming increasingly easy to see how they all cribbed from each other, how reporters at the same press conference quoted the same sources in slightly different ways, etc. And yet we were still in the Dark Ages then. Google Books didn’t exist. YouTube didn’t exist. Amazon’s Look Inside! feature was just a couple months old. Most newspaper archives were still extremely expensive to access. In those days, journalists gaming the facts still benefited from the relative opacity of information.
Today, things are far more transparent. For example, when I started reading How We Decide via Google Books, I immediately noted a sentence in the book’s first chapter in which Lehrer purports to depict a snap count Tom Brady exclaims in the midst of Super Bowl XXXVI, which took place in 2002:
Brady reads the Ram defense and calls out a series of coded commands: “White twenty! Ninety-six is the Mike! Omaha go!”
While such vivid, you-are-there bonbons of authenticity are the stuff best-sellers are made of, where exactly had it come from, I wondered. Did Lehrer watch a tape of Super Bowl XXXVI with the volume turned up really loud? Did he track down Tom Brady years after the fact and quiz him on what he’d shouted at the line of scrimmage during that particular moment?
A quick Google search pointed me toward an answer: Similar language is featured in a 2007 article in the Boston Globe that in part reads:
"White 20!" "96 is the mike!" "White 18!" "57 is the will!" "Set!"...
"Hey Jab!" he yelled out with urgency to his left, in the direction of receiver Jabar Gaffney. "Omaha! Go!"
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The Creationist GOP Party, already at war with facts, have started banning those who use said facts:
http://www.redstate.com/2012/0.....arn-a-ban/
Thus Fox News, the Discovery Institute, Heritage, Liberty University and other sundry right-wing echo chambers.
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That's a link to RedStain Mr Ass-stain. And most 'fact checkers' are indeed partisan pushers.
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Does anyone even read red state?
Hell Drudge doesn't even link to those guys.
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Red Who?
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Did a search on Reason.com.
Latest article that came up was from 2006.
OT: I got my Buckyballs today. Pain in the ass to get these fucking things back into a square again.
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I heard you're not supposed to eat them.
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I'll read Human Events occasionally, but I never click on the Red State articles that are always prominately linked to there. I did when they first started up but quickly realized they were were the flip-side of Huff Po, total morons.
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Flip-side meaning RS is right and HP is left and both sites are moronic. Wasn't implying Huff Po was intelligent.
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Facts:
A lot of people here read Red State.
Fact checkers are often stupid.
The right wing in this country lives in a universe of its own facts, not the real one.
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THIS IS WHAT TONY ACTUALLY BELIEVES
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How does the left wing not live in a universe of its own facts.
It never ceases to amaze me that Democrats REALLY believe that they like/have a monopoly on science and fact, when they spend so much of their lives revolting against the same.
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Most of the fact-checking articles I've read lately have been partisan bullshit, and have focused more on point scoring and accusations of hypocrisy or oversimplification than any actual dishonesty.
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Here's one: The free market allocates resources efficiently.
Fact Checker: That's wrong. I found someone who said it's not true and only morons believe this. Anyone who thinks this could be true, even in limited circumstances, also believes in conspiracies.
Apparently facts and their checking can only be in slogans less than 10 words.
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That's your example, the right's attempt at making "fact checkers" actually check facts instead of simply trying to make the right always look like the ones who are wrong?
Okay, if that's enough to convince you, I can see why you're a liberal, and why any argument I made to you, regardless of fact or merit would be completely ignored.
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Certainly, the soi-disant fact-checkers of established media, and certainly of the DemOp media, have given fact-checking a bad name, as it often devolves into commentary on expressed opinions or policy positions.
Real open-source fact-checking continues to bedevil the partisan media, though, beginning with the takedown of the forged Bush national guard letters, and continuing, one hopes forevermore.
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Of course, this is also a golden age of ignoring facts that contradict preconceptions.
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I'm going to pretend you didn't say that...
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Yeah, what's the use of fact-checking when partisans feel free to ignore facts at every turn?
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It's the process that matters, dude, not the results.
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yeah open source fact checking is still pretty well firewalled off with editorial control.
The media's complete non-coverage of fast and Furious being a prime example.
The failure of intervention in Libya and the distractions of "what Romney said" and anti-muslim video being a recent example.
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In other words you want the news media to be more partisan in favor of Republicans that it is.
Maybe that will bring balance. Maybe it will just supplement the established GOP message machines of FOX News and all of talk radio.
Or is fast and furious definitely as big a scandal as the latter outfits say it is?
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When Congress is investigating malfeasance in the DOJ, I think it's worth a story or two. You can bet your ass it would be front page news for weeks if Romney was president.
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Shorter Tony: Obama deserves to get his cock sucked by the entire establishment media! Don't shit on my parade!
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I disagree with Tony.
Must mean I am a Republican.
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The WSJ's Toranto has pointed out that what is being called fact checking these days is really nothing more than opinion.
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Well, yeah, waddya expect from that right-wing hack??!11
/derp
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Remember when Joe use to tell us media matters was non-partisan?
Good times.
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LOFL. You mean they're not?!?
But they are running Obama's superpac and Obama surely isn't partisan!
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I can't believe I read that whole thing. Was this a test to see how long I would stick with a way too long story about Pixar bathroom embellishments? I failed.
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Isn't the real problem is that this douche bag was peddling utter bullshit junk science? His book was ridiculous.
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Minor nit: A-6 Intruders are bombers, not fighters. Subsonic too, as no self-respecting fighter has been since the 1950s.
I think you probably did that on purpose...
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I would like to point out that H. L. Mencken admitted in several of his autobiographical works that he faked the news on several occasions. Indeed he describes one in some detail; he wrote an account of a major naval battle in the Russo-Japanese war based on factual information about the ships and major officers likely to be involved and his own lively imagination. He did so to scoop the other papers, he didn't get caught, and he didn't consider the story shameful.
The synthesis of news from prejudice and opinion has been, if not SOP then largely winked at, so long as the reporters didn't get caught IN PUBLIC. What has changed is that A) The people who care enough to check have a venue for exposing a fake that the Media does not control and B) The major Media had a period of a few decades during which they were largely biased in one direction AND nobody was in much of a position to call them on it. Put bluntly, without anyone to keep them on their toes, they got sloppy. And, frankly, for whatever reason they show no real sign of learning their lesson.
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"And it’s equally hard to imagine that journalists everywhere aren’t noting Lehrer’s travails and subsequently taking solemn, self-inflicted oaths to pursue their craft with enough honesty, accuracy, and transparency to make an angel squirm."
I find it very easy to imagine. The lesson to learn is that you can become a star by making shit up.
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fact checking now belongs to the People (tm). Two words say it all: throbbing memo.
hey dan, how's the frequency over there, bitch!!??
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Jonah Lehrer went to the "Right School" and had the proper opinions that fit the MSM. Fareed Zakaria went to the "Right School," held all the proper opinions, he could claim he knew better about the Middle East, and told everyone Bush was an idiot. Despite the fact Obama's use of Drones increases recruits, Obama surrendered Iraq to Iran (a bad move under any circumstance) and Obama is following many of Bush's other programs, Zakaria finds Obama to be brilliant and the MSM became exceedingly pleased because they have unity of opinion and diversity of appearance.
With Leher how do we know he just made up only the Dylan quotes. Zakaria was just following in the path blazed by Doris Kearns Goodwin. The MSM in America today behaves just like the Glavlit did. The MSM is in the Obama propaganda business and they they are just following the play books of Lenin, Mussolini, Bernays, Gobbels, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, Castro and Minh.
We are hopelessly misled, lost and collapsing as a country. And all the Libertarians in Reason seemed more concerned about are socially liberal ideals, which will get them praise from their buddies on the left, but have little to with reality.
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Carlsbad,
Not sure where you are coming from with that last bit. I don't hear anyone saying it's ok that our economy is being ruined or that the Patriot Act is ok now that obama is in charge.
But you have to go with the low hanging fruit and if it is easier to get gay marriage ok's or possibly one day to get marijuana in the same category as alcohol, then you need to push those with whatever allies you find.
And then, maybe someone who saw that you fought the good fight on a few issues may actually listen when you say something about the economy.
And if drug legalization works and fewer people are in prison and fewer murdered, you can point to it and say look the free market really does work and we did not need govt' to protect us. And that laissez-faire did not lead to chaos. Then that argument may carry more weight in other areas.
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Dear Greg,
Part One
This is an excellent article. Thank you for writing it. I agree with many of the commenters that institutional fact checkers can have an unconscious or conscious bias when they check facts in a news article. Let's not forget that journalists can leave out facts as well, and these omissions cannot be "checked" by a third party by virtue of their absence. This became evident when reports about the AP and other news gathering organizations sending legions of reporters to Alaska to sniff around Sarah Palin's trash bins became public while close to none were sent to Chicago to sniff around Hyde Park. The wife of one of these Alaskan bound reporters (and a friend) told me gleefully and with great pride that "X is going to Alaska to get dirt on Sarah Palin." Getting dirt and reporting are two different things - but according to my friend, this was her husband's mandate from his AP editor. Moreover, the sin of omission is another aspect of the decline of reporting that editors should pay more attention to. I am not a Sarah Sycophant, and never have been, but this was a despicable and unprofessional inequity which did a disservice to the American people and to Libertarian candidates for that matter.
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Part Two:
That said, I do want to point out one thing about your article, and that is you switch from talking about fact checking in Lehrer's books and fact checking in his articles as if they were the same thing. It's not entirely clear in your story but there is an underlying assumption that the process of fact checking of books is the same as fact checking in news articles. Magazines and newspapers employ fact checkers, but book publishers do not. Fact checking is the contractual obligation of the book author, at least in my experience. So it is true that Lehrer should have done a better job of fact checking himself or been as vigilant as possible when writing to cite sources in the text. As far as his books are concerned he is ultimately responsible for the contents, and made a pledge to the publisher in that regard when he signed his contract with them. Most book publishers of trade books do not require or even encourage footnotes in commercial nonfiction, and accept textual citations as adequate as long as there is enough information to allow a reader to find the source and see it for himself. A good copy editor will query a quote or fact for a source but it is up to the author and his editor whether or not to pay attention to the copy editor's query.
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Part three:
I understand mistakes can be made when you are under a tight deadline, but I am not privy to the kind of turn around times Lehrer's book publisher gave him. That said, it is fairly easy to incorporate the source into a sentence or paragraph as you write. I completely understand how a couple of source omissions can occur "here and there" in a 75,000-100,000 word manuscript. Some stories like the one about the discovery of the glue that led to Post It Notes has been oft told (and I've told it myself in a book I collaborated on) so it would have easy enough to say that, and then tell the story in his own way. Writing books under pressure is a challenge that I sympathize with on a personal level but we have to do the very best we can and admit our shortcomings when they are pointed out. Most good people will recognize the fallibility of humans. Most "here and there" mistakes and omissions are likely unintentional and therefore forgivable. However, serial errors of the kind you specify in this article may be more questionable and the result of other issues like hubris, arrogance, laziness, and so on. It's hard to know what is in someone's heart unless you know them very well.
Thank you for allowing me to comment.
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Why do all of these guys have such punchable faces?
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This tedious, pretentious, over-written exercise in pseudo investigative masturbation reminds me of those long-winded OCD nerds who go on computer forums to complain that a pixel seems to be missing from their 30 inch screen, you need to get a life.
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The major Media had a period of a few decades during which they were largely biased in one direction AND nobody was in much of a position to call them on it. Put bluntly, without anyone to keep them on their toes, they got sloppy. And, frankly, for whatever reason they show no real sign of learning their lesson.
P11-101 | OA0-002 -
Most fact checkers aren't. They just use that name because liberals are largely convinced by words rather than actions.
You see, if they called themselves accurately, fact checkers for the left wing, even liberals would know to be weary that what they're saying might be biased.
But because they don't use the words, "for the left wing," that's enough to convince liberals that they're either completely unbiased and neutral or biased towards the right wing. So if they say anything good about the right which, they do in a moderate sense rarely, the liberal will just assume it's right-biased. However, if it always makes the left look like it's right or the right look like it's wrong, which they do just about all the time, the liberal will assume it's unbiased and neutral merely because they don't call themselves "for the left wing." Don't believe me, ask what most liberals think about the bias of news media, and they'll almost all of them say that Fox News is corrupted for the right, and all other news, except the obvious ones like MSNBC that don't really hide it, is neutral. And even a good third will even think MSNBC is actually neutral.
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Cui bono. Who benefits. Sorts them out fine without checking their alleged facts.