If Fact Checkers Exist How Do Mistakes Still Get In?
Fact checkers don’t exist in every level of the media. While most magazines employ fact checkers, newspapers and book publishers do not. Journalists working for a daily paper must fact check their own work and then rely on their editor, hopefully, to catch any errors. This doesn’t of course, always happen. Book publishers also don’t have research departments and they rely on authors to present factual accounts of their works.
While both newspapers and book publishers are very vigilant about libel, they don’t spend the money, or allow for the extra time, it would take to fact check what they publish.
Fact Checking Scandals
One of the biggest scandals to highlight the fact that book publishers do not fact check was what happened with James Frey and his drug addiction memoir, A Million Little Pieces.
A memoir is, by definition, factual: It’s a non-fiction account of someone’s life story. While the tag insinuates that the facts are informed by memory, the work should not significantly mutate or alter the timeline or events in a person’s life. Published in 2003, the book was a huge hit for publisher Doubleday (an imprint of Random House) and really took off after being selected for Oprah’s bookclub. Then, in 2006, tabloid website thesmokinggun.com released a report that Frey had made up huge chunks of his story, exaggerating his criminal record and the depravity to which he sank during his years as an addict. The story blew up and left many in the media questioning why book publishers do not fact check their books.
Stories like this one in the Wall Street Journal surfaced addressing that very question.
Other scandals which have surfaced, that touch on fact checking more indirectly, deal with reporters fabricating sources. Famously Stephen Glass at The New Republic and Jayson Blair at The New York Times are two reporters who were both at the center of scandals in which they made up sources and quotes.
Interestingly, in this season of the HBO show The Wire -- the show is set in Baltimore and the focus of this season is the media -- that very thing is being dramatized. (The show involves a plot in which a reporter is beginning to fabricate quotes in order to get better stories.)
