Stephen Glass goes down
December 5, 2000 12:46 PM Subscribe
As my dear old daddy used to tell me, "don't believe anything you hear and only half of what you see."
posted by CRS at 12:59 PM on December 5, 2000
posted by grimmelm at 1:40 PM on December 5, 2000
And the massage part wasn't worth getting screwed over for.
posted by solistrato at 1:52 PM on December 5, 2000
posted by agaffin at 2:28 PM on December 5, 2000
posted by waxpancake at 2:54 PM on December 5, 2000
posted by dhartung at 4:50 PM on December 5, 2000
posted by megnut at 5:17 PM on December 5, 2000
posted by beefula at 7:09 PM on December 5, 2000
The New Yorker has one of the most bad-ass fact checking departments in the business. Or at least it did as of the late 80s-early 90s, when the department's head lectured to my journalism classes at NYU numerous times. I presume from Megnut's post that it's pretty much still intact. They will go over every minute detail of every article, and anything they can't confirm gets deleted.
But in this case, what could they do? They couldn't call Luminant. They had to take it on faith.
By the way, everyone's favorite obsessive-compulsive serial plagarizer, Ruth Shalit, is up to her old tricks again.
posted by aaron at 9:14 PM on December 5, 2000
Most places fact-check along the lines as depicted in Almost Famous: go through and ask everyone in the article, "Did you say this?", maybe check the spelling of things like Kyrghyzstan. The New Yorker, by contrast, was notorious for a draconian your-mother-told-you-are-you-sure-she's-your-mother approach, all while sticking to a style book that apparently requires complex sentences and elimination of pop culture references.
Allegedly, under Tina Brown's much-maligned tenure, there was a notable increase in mistakes -- despite a doubling of staff.
In any case, it's always been true that writers weaned in the outer world of journalism tended to find their first New Yorker fact-checking a cold, wet shock treatment, while writers moving on from that magazine often found things published that they always expected would get fact-checked out of the article before it saw print.
posted by dhartung at 1:08 AM on December 7, 2000
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posted by capt.crackpipe at 12:56 PM on December 5, 2000