Posted: 2009 May 26, Tuesday 17:46
Check Those Facts -- If You Can
By George Merlis
The State of the Fourth Estate is bad and getting worse. This is the first in an occasional series on the problems of the media today.
Let’s start with a history lesson: How did journalists come to be called the fourth estate in the first place? We’re not really sure; the most widely-accepted first reference to the media as the “fourth estate” may well be apocryphal -- which is singularly appropriate.
In pre-revolutionary France, society was composed of three estates: the clergy, the nobility and the common people. No reference to journalists as a fourth estate in the Ancien Regime. In fact, the first known reference was in 1841 when the British author Thomas Carlyle described MP Edmund Burke as pointing to the reporters covering a debate and saying, “There are three estates in Parliament but in the reporters’ gallery yonder, there sits a fourth estate, more important far than they all.” A nice package, but since there weren’t three estates in Parliament, since the British government and society were not organized that way at that time, Carlyle may have been making up the quote.
Carlyle, Above, Quoted Burke.....
... But Did Burke Ever Say It?
Back when I was a newspaper reporter, we called colleagues who manufactured quotes “pipe artists.” Was Carlyle a pipe artist? We’ll never know. But it’s altogether fitting that we can’t be absolutely sure about the provenance of the fourth estate sobriquet, so the media’s nickname may be based on a quote that was never uttered.
It’s impossible to fact-check the sole source of a quote supposedly spoken more than 100 years ago, but it’s not hard to fact-check a current story. Unfortunately, journalists are doing an increasingly poor job of confirming the facts.
Some years ago, a friend of mine was engaged to a woman who was a fact-checker for The New Yorker. I was a newspaper reporter at the time and had never heard of a fact-checker (which speaks volumes about daily journalism, doesn’t it?). I asked her what a fact-checker did and she said, “We check and confirm every assertion of fact in an article.” Every fact! New Yorker stories could run 6,000 to 9,000 words and be chock-a-block filled with assertions of fact. Yet someone looked up every single one of them and confirmed what the writer reported.
Some years later, TV Guide bought a story I wrote about a segment I’d produced for ABC News in Haiti. A week before the story was to appear, I got a phone call from a fact-checker at the magazine. “You referred to the national palace in your article. I can find a presidential palace, but not a national palace. Can you cite some source to confirm it’s the national palace?”
I could cite no source because, oops, I’d gotten the name of the building wrong. It was the presidential palace. So when TV Guide published my article, the error was corrected. Unfortunately, the broadcast story ran first and, since there was no similar fact-checking mechanism at ABC News, my on-air story had President-For-Life Baby Doc Duvalier reading his endless New Year’s speech in the national, not the presidential, palace. It was a minor error that in no way changed the nature of the piece. Yes, but, if it was so simple for me to confuse the name of a building, what other “facts” slip by in daily print and broadcast journalism for want of checking?
One might take comfort in the fact that the Internet now affords journalists ample opportunity to fact-check on their own. In fact, for this essay, I went to Wikipedia to confirm that the name of the structure where the president of Haiti lives and works is the presidential, not the national, palace. But not so fast! The web isn’t all that reliable, either.
Consider this story:
Triple Oscar-winning composer Maurice Jarre died last March and some of his obituaries contained this pithy quote: "One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack. Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head that only I can hear."
Lovely quote. Great summation of a career in music. Only Jarre never said it. It was contributed to Wikipedia in the hours immediately after the announcement of Jarre’s death by an Irish university student who wanted to see whether the media would fact-check it. Shane Fitzgerald, 22, a sociology student at University College, Dublin, posted the quote without further sourcing it. Accordingly, Wikipedia took it down in short order. But not short enough order. It wound up in many obits around the world. Fitzgerald e-mailed some of the major publications that had used the quote to give them a shot at setting the record straight. Only England’s Guardian printed a correction. Others corrected their online obituaries, but did not run corrections in their print editions. But some publications didn’t even go that far, the Irish Times reported. In its account of the student's experiment, the Dublin-based newspaper reported that the erroneous quotation still adorned some online obits, despite Fitzgerald’s e-mails, the Irish Times story on the hoax and a widely-circulated Associate Press report.
The Associated Press story quoted a Wikipedia spokesperson as saying, “We always tell people: If you see that quote on Wikipedia, find it somewhere else too.”
Two sources are always a good idea. Except Source B might have gotten the “facts” from Source A and if B doesn’t tell the journalist that’s where he got it, a reporter would think he had the story from two sources. Which is why fact-checkers would be so important, if publications and broadcasts could afford them. But consider this: daily newspapers, radio and TV stations didn’t have the wherewithal for TV Guide-New Yorker level fact-checking 20 years ago when they were rolling in dough, so they certainly don’t have it today.
Thus it falls to the individual reporter, editor or producer to fact-check. And as casual as fact-checking by those folks was in my days as a newspaper reporter and TV news producer, it has to have gotten even sloppier in this era of “right-sized” newsrooms and diminished resources committed to what I once heard a publisher call “Non-revenue-related matter.” (i.e. the news.)
For my media mastery techniques, read “How to Master the Media.”
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