![jayrosen:
Over which of these two statements on fact checking does the flame of a free press burn brighter?
Andrew Donohue, editor, Voice of San Diego, a born-on-the-web news site, founded 2005. (Link.)
We believe we have an obligation to sort through public statements and determine the validity of them the best we can. It’s part of our core mission…
[But] it’s not easy. There are many shades of truth. It’s not often as black and white as we consider truth to be. Calling out something as false is often misconstrued as endorsing the opposing side’s ideology. And we catch the most amount of blowback from sources and public officials for our judgments. It can be uncomfortable, and for all the time and effort expended in it, you can see how it would slide down the list of priorities for news organizations.
But we really don’t like “he said, she said” journalism. We don’t consider ourselves stenographers for public officials or the powerful. We have an active responsibility to you to not pass along junk information. So we make it a priority to write with authority and determine, as best we can, what is true. (We have a set of rules to guide us as we do that.)
Arthur Brisbane, public editor of the New York Times, a newspaper founded in 1851. (Link.)
I join others who worry that The Times needs to be very careful with this. Jill Abramson, the executive editor, said that if fact-checking were made a “reflexive element of too many news stories, our readers would find The Times was being tendentious.” Readers, she added, could come to see The Times “as a combatant, not as an arbiter of what the facts were.”
Ubiquitous argument in straight news articles is not the way to go. Checking facts in politics — and in other subjects — takes time, resources and great care. Editors and reporters need to identify priorities and exercise judgment: they cannot do everything.
For these reasons, I think The Times should broaden the “Fact Check” sidebars to include issues that arise outside of the debate forum. Regular installments of fact-checking journalism, identified as such, would strengthen the paper’s approach. Links from fact-check items back to the original articles online would help readers connect the dots.
I favor rebutting assertions in some routine news articles. But The Times needs to be disciplined about it. The paper’s straight news function remains its most valuable asset, which would be undermined if argument replaced fact-gathering.
Italics by Jay. Image by William Warby, Creative Commons license.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lyft7haOdU1qzbwu1o1_500.jpg)
Over which of these two statements on fact checking does the flame of a free press burn brighter?
Andrew Donohue, editor, Voice of San Diego, a born-on-the-web news site, founded 2005. (Link.)
We believe we have an obligation to sort through public statements and determine the validity of them the best we can. It’s part of our core mission…
[But] it’s not easy. There are many shades of truth. It’s not often as black and white as we consider truth to be. Calling out something as false is often misconstrued as endorsing the opposing side’s ideology. And we catch the most amount of blowback from sources and public officials for our judgments. It can be uncomfortable, and for all the time and effort expended in it, you can see how it would slide down the list of priorities for news organizations.
But we really don’t like “he said, she said” journalism. We don’t consider ourselves stenographers for public officials or the powerful. We have an active responsibility to you to not pass along junk information. So we make it a priority to write with authority and determine, as best we can, what is true. (We have a set of rules to guide us as we do that.)
Arthur Brisbane, public editor of the New York Times, a newspaper founded in 1851. (Link.)
I join others who worry that The Times needs to be very careful with this. Jill Abramson, the executive editor, said that if fact-checking were made a “reflexive element of too many news stories, our readers would find The Times was being tendentious.” Readers, she added, could come to see The Times “as a combatant, not as an arbiter of what the facts were.”
Ubiquitous argument in straight news articles is not the way to go. Checking facts in politics — and in other subjects — takes time, resources and great care. Editors and reporters need to identify priorities and exercise judgment: they cannot do everything.
For these reasons, I think The Times should broaden the “Fact Check” sidebars to include issues that arise outside of the debate forum. Regular installments of fact-checking journalism, identified as such, would strengthen the paper’s approach. Links from fact-check items back to the original articles online would help readers connect the dots.
I favor rebutting assertions in some routine news articles. But The Times needs to be disciplined about it. The paper’s straight news function remains its most valuable asset, which would be undermined if argument replaced fact-gathering.
Italics by Jay. Image by William Warby, Creative Commons license.
