The NY Times Asks Their Readers, "hey should we actually check facts or nahhh?"

DivideByZero

What we need is for news organizations to be this guy:



In the case of the "apologizing for America" example, where fact-checking Romney's statements would be trying to prove a negative, it's pretty easy to effectively rebut a blatant untruth while not sounding partisan:

"When questioned on this point, the Romney campaign was unable to reference a specific instance of President Obama apologizing for America."

Bagginses

The Ender wrote:

I don't think you know how original reporting actually works. There isn't a source because the report is the goddamn source. What the hell is his citation supposed to look like? "My, today, this paper"?

Except that the number of times a newspaper reporter is doing original, first-hand reporting is vanishingly small. Most reporters aren't in the lab, or in the committee or in the analyst's chair; they just have the story broken to them by the expert, or by the expert's media contact. The NYT is not Nature.

What the fuck are you talking about? They're doing original reporting when they go to campaign events and write down the speeches. This whole conversation is whether stories should have more than that. Hell, most verification consists of calling up an expert source or citing a fact that can be considered common knowledge. Hell, even most science reporting can't use citation because most of the articles being discussed haven't been printed yet. Of course, in text citation are still citations, and journalists use in text citations, so the point is moot.

So, in conclusion, not only do you not know what you're talking about, you don't even know what we're talking about.

PantsB

V1m wrote:

You can certainly report x, y, z circumstances and facts that cast doubt on the subject's statements.

Eg: Consider

(1) Bob Smith denied tax evasion and said that he simply misunderstood the tax form and incorrectly reported his deductions.

(2) Bob Smith denied tax evasion and said that he simply misunderstood the tax form and incorrectly reported his deductions. Smith worked as an attorney consulting on personal taxation for 7 years, and recently had a recovery suit filed against him by company he still owes money to on his BMW .

(3) Bob Smith lied when he denied tax evasion and said that he simply misunderstood the tax form and incorrectly reported his deductions. Smith worked as an attorney consulting on personal taxation for 7 years, proving that he couldn't have made this kind of mistake, and recently had a recovery suit filed against him by company he still owes money to on his BMW, so we know that he committed tax fraud because he needed the money.

In both cases, only facts are being reported. Only the second case is journalism; the first is mere reporting and the third is a (hostile) opinion piece.

Not if you stripe it of a baser style.
"(3) Bob Smith denied tax evasion and said that he simply misunderstood the tax form and incorrectly reported his deductions. This denial is highly dubious as Smith possesses expertise in the field given his 7 year experience as an attorney consulting on personal taxation. There is recent evidence of financial shortcomings, including a repossession order on his luxury automobile, for Mr. Smith that may have motivated his actions."

is more accurate and more informative than 2. You don't have to be start typing like a youtube comment when making reasonable judgements.

PantsB

Here's the WaPo article when Nixon resigned.

Declaring that he has never been a quitter, Mr. Nixon said that to leave office before the end of his term " is abhorrent to every instinct in my body."

But "as President, I must put the interests of America first," he said.

While the President acknowledged that some of his judgments "were wrong," he made no confession of the "high crimes and misdemeanors" with which the House Judiciary Committee charged him in its bill of impeachment.

Specifically, he did not refer to Judiciary Committee charges that in the cover-up of Watergate crimes he misused government agencies such as the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Internal Revenue Service.

Yar

PantsB wrote:

Not if you stripe it of a baser style.
"(3) Bob Smith denied tax evasion and said that he simply misunderstood the tax form and incorrectly reported his deductions. This denial is highly dubious as Smith possesses expertise in the field given his 7 year experience as an attorney consulting on personal taxation. There is recent evidence of financial shortcomings, including a repossession order on his luxury automobile, for Mr. Smith that may have motivated his actions."

is more accurate and more informative than 2. You don't have to be start typing like a youtube comment when making reasonable judgements.

And to some limited degree this is ok. I may have pointed out the wrong example. Here's where I think a lot of this goes wrong:

NYTimes: "Mitt Romney said, 'Obama always makes speeches apologizing to the world for America.' However, we fact-checked and discovered that Obama has never used the word 'apologize' in foreign affairs speeches, so Romney's statement is not supported by the facts."

The problem is whether or not "using the word apologize" constitutes fact-checking Romney's statement. Apologizing, and using the word "apologize," aren't the same thing.

If you're reporting on a candidate's speech, you're reporting on a lot of statements that are naturally laden with particular points-of-view and philosophical backdrops. The journalistic thing to do here is, for the most part, to just report what was said. It's difficult to draw the line. Lies, damn lies, and statistics, right? I would only imagine that you'd have two fact-checking camps, one calling all the Dems liars and all the Pubs honest, and the other, the opposite.

If a box of cereal says it "has no added sugar" but actually has a ton of sugar added, that's one thing. If it says, "full of hearty, wholesome goodness, a great way to start your day..." then how exactly do you fact-check that? That's my concern here. I don't think anyone disagrees that there are facts and there are lies and that journalism helps to sort it out. If a candidate says, "I never accepted money from XYZ" then there is no question that there is journalism to be done, and sourced facts showing he did accept money from XYZ is not even up for debate as to journalistic integrity. It's the essence of journalism. But again, it comes down to vigilantism. Should journalists attempt to take truth into their own hands? Maybe someone might say, "I think re-electing Obama would be best for the country" and then Fox News would "fact-check" that and determine it to be a lie. Where do you draw the line?

SyphonBlue

"I think re-electing Obama would be best for the country" is not a fact. It's an opinion.

"President Obama destroyed America and apologized to our enemies" is not an opinion.

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Phillishere

Vanguard wrote:

This just sounds bad. Asking whether or not you should fact check should make people seriously consider the reliability of that news outlet.

Of course, it won't.

The follow-up is, if anything, worse:

http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/12/update-to-my-previous-post-on-truth-vigilantes/

First, though, I must lament that “truth vigilante” generated way more heat than light. A large majority of respondents weighed in with, yes, you moron, The Times should check facts and print the truth.

That was not the question I was trying to ask. My inquiry related to whether The Times, in the text of news columns, should more aggressively rebut “facts” that are offered by newsmakers when those “facts” are in question. I consider this a difficult question, not an obvious one.
...
By the way, I should add that I did receive some thoughtful responses to the blogpost from people who recognize that the issue is timely and unresolved. Here is one from Greg Sargent at The Washington Post...

The comments are just as uniformly negative. It's also notable that the Times has scrubbed the discussion off the front page, when they usually leave the public editor posts up for a while.

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Phillishere

Vanguard wrote:

Again, if you are going to report what the people who want to lead our country are saying, you need to investigate everything they're saying. Fucking Yahoo! news does this shit.

The reason we have the current political discourse, where you can say outright lies with impunity, is because investigative journalism is not practiced on any large scale from the major media outlets in our country.

If anything, the guy is upholding the grand tradition of The Times public editors being morons. Okrent was actually worse.

He's also earned a very public lashing from other news organizations:

https://www.google.com/search?q=new+york+times+public+editors&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

mrt144

SyphonBlue wrote:

"I think re-electing Obama would be best for the country" is not a fact. It's an opinion.

"President Obama destroyed America and apologized to our enemies" is not an opinion.

And this happens all the time on the internet where people state opinions as fact, sometimes unwittingly. It's absolutely up to the press to call BS on that kind of thing, just as we do round these parts.

Phillishere

The Fox News response is classic:

The New York Times Ponders: 'Are We Biased Enough?'

The lefties on Twitter are very upset with their favorite paper, The New York Times. They’ve even started a hashtag (#NewNYTSlogans) attacking them for the apparent lack of dedication to truth that the paper has exhibited of late in its pages.

An article titled, “Should The Times Be a Truth Vigilante?” is what has sent them into full fledged mock mode and, as best I can understand it, they believe that the Times has basically acknowledged that the truth and fact checking are not top priorities in The New York Times newsroom.

Not exactly. These folks are actually upset that the newsroom isn’t inserting their opinion enough. And it looks like the Times is interested in hearing out their complaint.

Read more: http://nation.foxnews.com/new-york-times/2012/01/12/new-york-times-ponders-are-we-biased-enough#ixzz1jMZhomH

Every now and then it's nice to check in and realize just how batshit crazy Fox News is.

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Bagginses

Phillishere wrote:

Vanguard wrote:

This just sounds bad. Asking whether or not you should fact check should make people seriously consider the reliability of that news outlet.

Of course, it won't.

The follow-up is, if anything, worse:

http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/12/update-to-my-previous-post-on-truth-vigilantes/

First, though, I must lament that “truth vigilante” generated way more heat than light. A large majority of respondents weighed in with, yes, you moron, The Times should check facts and print the truth.

That was not the question I was trying to ask. My inquiry related to whether The Times, in the text of news columns, should more aggressively rebut “facts” that are offered by newsmakers when those “facts” are in question. I consider this a difficult question, not an obvious one.
...
By the way, I should add that I did receive some thoughtful responses to the blogpost from people who recognize that the issue is timely and unresolved. Here is one from Greg Sargent at The Washington Post...

The comments are just as uniformly negative. It's also notable that the Times has scrubbed the discussion off the front page, when they usually leave the public editor posts up for a while.

That's the important bit. The usual Times operating procedure is to print the quotes about, say, health care as they're made over the course of the week then publish a giant assessment article of the whole issue in the monster they put out on sundays.

Thanatos

Bagginses wrote:

Journalists are supposed to show their work and walk us through the evaluation. Think about the number of claims made in a speech or interview. To print an evaluation would require a book and at least a week of research, thereby breaking both the logistics and timeliness of the newspaper. That's why pundit assessments in stories are so popular. If a person is already familiar with a subject and respected, he can give an immediate and trustworthy assessment that takes the line.

If it's something you're directly quoting in the article, it takes less than a minute to Google it and find out if it's actually true.

And no, you wouldn't need to "write a book" about most of these claims. I'll bet that I could research all of the claims in a speech in less than an hour, and I'm not even a fucking journalist.

enlightenedbum

Thanatos wrote:

Bagginses wrote:

Journalists are supposed to show their work and walk us through the evaluation. Think about the number of claims made in a speech or interview. To print an evaluation would require a book and at least a week of research, thereby breaking both the logistics and timeliness of the newspaper. That's why pundit assessments in stories are so popular. If a person is already familiar with a subject and respected, he can give an immediate and trustworthy assessment that takes the line.

If it's something you're directly quoting in the article, it takes less than a minute to Google it and find out if it's actually true.

And no, you wouldn't need to "write a book" about most of these claims. I'll bet that I could research all of the claims in a speech in less than an hour, and I'm not even a fucking journalist.

You know things, so obviously you're not a journalist.

Thanatos

Yar wrote:

And to some limited degree this is ok. I may have pointed out the wrong example. Here's where I think a lot of this goes wrong:

NYTimes: "Mitt Romney said, 'Obama always makes speeches apologizing to the world for America.' However, we fact-checked and discovered that Obama has never used the word 'apologize' in foreign affairs speeches, so Romney's statement is not supported by the facts."

The problem is whether or not "using the word apologize" constitutes fact-checking Romney's statement. Apologizing, and using the word "apologize," aren't the same thing.

If you're reporting on a candidate's speech, you're reporting on a lot of statements that are naturally laden with particular points-of-view and philosophical backdrops. The journalistic thing to do here is, for the most part, to just report what was said. It's difficult to draw the line. Lies, damn lies, and statistics, right? I would only imagine that you'd have two fact-checking camps, one calling all the Dems liars and all the Pubs honest, and the other, the opposite.

If a box of cereal says it "has no added sugar" but actually has a ton of sugar added, that's one thing. If it says, "full of hearty, wholesome goodness, a great way to start your day..." then how exactly do you fact-check that? That's my concern here. I don't think anyone disagrees that there are facts and there are lies and that journalism helps to sort it out. If a candidate says, "I never accepted money from XYZ" then there is no question that there is journalism to be done, and sourced facts showing he did accept money from XYZ is not even up for debate as to journalistic integrity. It's the essence of journalism. But again, it comes down to vigilantism. Should journalists attempt to take truth into their own hands? Maybe someone might say, "I think re-electing Obama would be best for the country" and then Fox News would "fact-check" that and determine it to be a lie. Where do you draw the line?

So why has no one asked Mitt Romney what he means by that?

I mean, it's not like the guy doesn't talk to the press. Isn't that what they're supposed to fucking be there for?

mrt144

enlightenedbum wrote:

Thanatos wrote:

Bagginses wrote:

Journalists are supposed to show their work and walk us through the evaluation. Think about the number of claims made in a speech or interview. To print an evaluation would require a book and at least a week of research, thereby breaking both the logistics and timeliness of the newspaper. That's why pundit assessments in stories are so popular. If a person is already familiar with a subject and respected, he can give an immediate and trustworthy assessment that takes the line.

If it's something you're directly quoting in the article, it takes less than a minute to Google it and find out if it's actually true.

And no, you wouldn't need to "write a book" about most of these claims. I'll bet that I could research all of the claims in a speech in less than an hour, and I'm not even a fucking journalist.

You know things, so obviously you're not a journalist.

Epic slam is epic. This is like Grandmama level.

Delzhand

CptHamilton wrote:

SyphonBlue wrote:

TL DR wrote:

Yeah, this is a valid question. There is immense pressure on news outlets to appear "balanced". Hence the recent self-destruction of Politifact.

And news outlets, as they are news outlets, should be pushing back and telling them "Nah fuck you, these are called FACTS not OPINIONS"

They're not talking about facts being reported, though. They're talking about the factual accuracy of statements which they are reporting. It's the difference between the following two articles:

Article 1 wrote:

President Obama, the anti-christ communist currently squatting in the White House, murdered a baby today. Newt Gingrich addressed the public on these and other topics this afternoon.

and

Article 2 wrote:

During a speech this afternoon, Newt Gingrich asserted, "President Obama is the anti-christ. He's a communist squatting in the White House, and I heard that he murdered a baby."

The Times wouldn't print Article 1 because it's bullshit. As it stands, they would print Article 2 because it is a fact that Gingrich said that. Whether or not something a politician (or other noteworthy figure that the Times is likely to quote) says is factually accurate isn't something that any major news outlet I'm aware of addresses. The Daily Show does it, and there are a number of online resources that go through speeches and pick out the bullshit, but I'd challenge you to find me a single major US newspaper that does what the Times is suggesting above.

Maybe someone can tell me why they aren't capable of running

Article 3 wrote:

During a speech this afternoon, Newt Gingrich asserted, "President Obama is the anti-christ. He's a communist squatting in the White House, and I heard that he murdered a baby." Theologians are divided at best on Obama's anti-christ status, and there are no convictions on his record for any violent crime. President Obama is considered by most scholars and constitutional lawyers to be legally elected. Gingrich declined to mention which policies he considered "communist".

Toldo

As a journalist, an inane question like that makes my blood boil. Report the truth--it's your fucking job.