Dallas Fort-Worth Star-Telegram Corrections Policy
This article announces the Dallas Fort-Worth Star-Telegram’s efforts to monitor their staff’s writing for plagiarism and fabrication.
“The Star-Telegram is responding, effective immediately, with a permanent fact-checking policy designed to help keep staffers alert to the dangers of plagiarism and fabrication. The policy also aims to assure readers that this newspaper’s constant goal is to earn their trust with coverage that’s fair, accurate and balanced.”
Executive Editor Jim Witt explains in the article that the paper will examine several local articles each month to check how they were written and researched, including contacting people quoted in the article.
The new policy comes in the wake of a number of journalists being outed for errors in their work at papers across the country, including a former reporter for the Star-Telegram.
Addendum 3/30: Several news librarians have pointed out an ironic error in the article. The article says that the Star-Telegram is the first newspaper to institute such a program for checking on reporter’s work. Many news librarians have been corresponding about similar programs at their newspapers, like sending letters to people quoted in articles to check for any errors, and how they’ve been around for years. Someone even pointed out that the Star-Telegram used to have a post-publication fact checking system in place. One asked, “So what we’re saying is the Star Telegram’s very first story about the new fact-checking policy wasn’t properly fact checked and should be corrected?” A response from the Star-Telegram about these ironies indicates the reporter did not do a very good job of explaining what the unique part of their new system is: the difference between what they’re doing and what other papers are doing is the checks for plagiarism. A journalism professor writes that this practice is not new. Post-publication fact checking has been “in and out of style” since the 1930s.