Why yes, yes it is!
People have been hopping over a recent piece by the New York Times public editor Arthur Brisbane in which he asks whether reporters should be fact-checkers.
“The New York Times Does Not Know What Journalism Is Or What a Journalists’ [sic] Job Is,” says one angry writer. “Fourth Estate Sale! Everything Must Go!” writes a cleverer one.
The tone is one of surprise. Of course this is what journalists should do, they seem to say, isn’t it what we pay them for?
Though there are several interpretations of what checking facts actually entails, the answer is still mostly no. Lawyers check occasional stories that editors deem especially sensitive to legal difficulties, but newspaper journalists don’t. Some magazines have fact-checkers—Eye Weekly used to have some good ones, Toronto Life still does—but many don’t.
This is not to say newspaper journalists don’t check their facts. But if you’ll allow me a little semantic specificity, that’s a different thing. Fact-checking is by definition a separate stream, a re-reporting of a story, in effect, by someone who does not take the same things for granted the writer might. Though not flawless, it’s a very good system, and it’d be just great if newspapers could do that. But they’re already losing the race for immediacy, so it’s not likely, at least not until they realize they’ve already lost that race and start running ones they can win. Let’s return to that.
Journalists, especially ones with regular beats, tend to know an awful lot about the subjects they cover, as I’ve mentioned before, and so often know out of hand that this or that is right or wrong. That could be seen as a form of checking facts, but it is still not fact-checking.
Editors also read what writers write, and I’ve received notes every once in a while from mine pointing out that I’ve got something wrong. But even that’s not a fact-checking system; it’s just varying bases of knowledge casually intersecting.
But there’s another level of fact-checking that Brisbane brings up, one that would have reporters check the facts of people they quote. Once again, this is something expert journalists—journalists with areas of expertise—could do with relative ease, but it’s also something that butts up against the notion of objectivity in journalism.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: there is no such thing as objectivity in journalism. This oughtn’t to be a controversial statement. Its basic impossibility should be self-evident. And yet people, often highly placed ones that run websites and newspapers and TV networks, seem to think there’s a way a person can ignore everything she believes, thinks and knows while relating stories that often get at the heart of everything she believes, thinks and knows.
Typical tools journalists are taught, or at least learn, in order to emulate objectivity include giving air to “both” sides of the story. Now, I’ve tried to come up with a story that has just two sides, and I’ve failed. (Feel free to try yourself, though—let me know if you come up with something.) But aside from there being no such thing as two sides to every story, the search for “the other side” can lead, among especially clueless journalists, to absurdities like quoting Holocaust deniers, or giving homophobes a say in same-sex marriage stories (which, for those of you who might think that’s just peachy, would be equivalent to giving racists a say in why Obama shouldn’t be US president).
But objectivity isn’t only impossible, it’s undesirable. Striving towards objectivity has a tendency to ignore what should be a journalist’s higher calling, which is not only conveying facts, but trying to get at truth inasmuch as they’re able. Now sure, there are many areas where truth is purely subjective and depends entirely on beliefs or points of view (abortion, for instance, or the morality of war), but there are also many that aren’t. Brisbane pointed to the current Republican primaries in the States, and the coming presidential election, as examples of situations when highly placed people lie, or at least obfuscate, in public. Paul Krugman helpfully listed a few by Mittens Romney today. But of course, it happens all the time.
I would love to think, as many of those noisy complainers apparently do, that newspapers and websites and news shows were checking Harper facts and Kenny facts and Rae facts and Enbridge facts, but for the most part, they’re not. They’re reporting what these people say, and then reporting what other people who don’t agree with them say. Sometimes they report on people who claim to have fact-checked them for us, and quote them, but they tend not to check those facts, either.
You could make the argument that it’s not journalism’s job to check facts like this, that think tanks and professors and other experts should be doing that, and then answering journalists’ questions about the work they’ve been able to do but news organizations are generally not well enough staffed to do for themselves.
It’s not an argument I would make, though.
As well-established companies like the Star, the Times, the Globe and others are thrashing about trying to find their place in the future of media, I think they could do worse than read through the comments that Brisbane’s piece elicited, paying attention not only to the content, which is often ill-informed, but to the tone. It’s a tone of expectation, layered on a sense of betrayal, spread over a thin, cracked but still solid bedrock of “We thought you were looking out for us.”
Journalism’s roots are partisan. Sometime in the 20th century, the powers that be decided objectivity was the way to gain the public’s trust, so they started to move away from private patrons and single-industry and –party affiliations. That worked well for a while, and it still works in many instances for the Star, which has its non-objective Atkinsonian principles on the books (which contrasts with the loyalty to the chief magistrate, however mitigated, expressed in every issue of the Globe). But the 20th century’s dead and buried, and I think it’s time papers started to be partisan again, to look out for and promote the interests of one identifiable group: us. Us against corporations, us against politicians who rely on the perpetual information avalanche to bury their half and quarter truths. A whole bunch of people thought you were doing this already, newspapers; this would be a great time to start.
There’s an intriguing sidenote to fact-checking that also came up this week, involving a storyteller and writer named Ivan Coyote and a library sciences class assigned to fact-check his birth name. I’m a big fan of Ivan’s, and disagree completely with
him her. Check back for more on that next week. Speaking of fact-checking: I didn’t sufficiently check this one out myself. It’s an issue that can get difficult with people of various gender presentations and identifications, though frankly, in this case, I could just have gone to her website, where she refers to herself in the feminine.
Original Article
Source: Toronto Standard
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