On Factchecking in Journalism
I often wonder how factchecking in journalism works. I realize that systems vary by publication and there probably isn’t a standard or norm in the profession. I saw the film Shattered Glass tonight, which deals with a journalist who fabricated all or portions of 27 of his 41 articles in The New Republic. One of the issues that gets raised is whether the factcheckers should have caught his fabrications.
I work with factcheckers occasionally. As they’re asking me questions, I often wonder how it is that they decide which tidbits of the article need to be validated. What makes them decide to call an outside source to verify a particular fact? Sometimes, the information is readily available on the Web somewhere, but they need confirmation from a person that the information is correct.
Recently, I helped a factchecker verify information in an article, but some errors he didn’t ask me about made it into the text of the article. Had he asked before it was published, I would have been able to correct the errors. The mistakes were significant enough that the publication needed to run a correction for each of them. That situation made me wonder if I’m doing all I can to help factcheckers. It’s not my place to preview an article to check all of the facts related to my work. And some publications don’t like to share drafts of their articles, especially with people close to their subject.
I let factcheckers who are verifying information related to my job know that they can come to me for assistance. I trust their judgment about whether something needs my verification. How do I reach the factcheckers that may not think about contacting me?
The system in place at TNR during the time the film covers relies on the journalist’s notes for an integral part of the factchecking process. If a journalist has errors in his notes, then those errors could appear in the piece. It seems to me that a big piece of the system is trust: trust that the journalist took accurate notes and did not fabricate any part of what he covered and trust that the factchecker knows what to check and how to check it.
