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Does old media really factcheck?

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  • #52
    expectationlost
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 11,983 ✭✭✭✭expectationlost


    L1011 wrote: »
    It implies more control/power than "major shareholder" does; that is effectively what they are trying to say by being completely factually inaccurate.
    ok but I still don't think it applies to the above sentence. Does Roy Greenslade, Colm Keena, Colin Gleeson, Ronan McGreevy, Peter O'Dwyer, Sean Murray and Anne Harris all not know writing "Denis O'Brien is majority shareholder of INM is wrong"? its just doesn't make sense.. what is going on? Im not the most business minded person and I spotted it.
    Funnily enough now searching styleguide AND majority vs plurality gets few hits https://sites.google.com/site/heraldstyleguide/ https://archive.org/stream/pdfy-t5_427WX1jE8GyCg/DI_Style_Manual_djvu.txt


  • #53
    L1011
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 69,537 ✭✭✭✭L1011


    I'd say there's a lot of copying and assuming the first writer was right going on for the non-Irish ones. For the domestic writers - deliberately inaccurate to pander perhaps?


  • #54
    expectationlost
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 11,983 ✭✭✭✭expectationlost


    L1011 wrote: »
    I'd say there's a lot of copying and assuming the first writer was right going on for the non-Irish ones. For the domestic writers - deliberately inaccurate to pander perhaps?
    considering Roy Greenslade lives in Donegal half the time they are all domestic.


  • #55
    IRE60
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 1,882 ✭✭✭IRE60


    L1011 wrote: »
    deliberately inaccurate to pander perhaps?

    No - lazy, sloppy and ilinformed. Once one of them used it, it simply became the 'norm'


  • #56
    expectationlost
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 11,983 ✭✭✭✭expectationlost


    IRE60 wrote: »
    No - lazy, sloppy and ilinformed. Once one of them used it, it simply became the 'norm'
    but we're told these are legacy media who do things right atleast two of them have paywalls? do they not have processes to prevent errors? how would a newspaper prevented these errors in the good old days?


  • #57
    IRE60
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 1,882 ✭✭✭IRE60


    expectationlost wrote: »
    but we're told these are legacy media who do things rights atleast two of them have paywalls? do they not have processes to prevent errors? how would a newspaper prevented these errors in the good old days?

    In my opinion - better resources and better trained staff back when print was king

    (As an aside if you want to see how it should work watch the film 'brights lights, big city')


  • #58
    expectationlost
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 11,983 ✭✭✭✭expectationlost


    IRE60 wrote: »
    In my opinion - better resources and better trained staff back when print was king

    (As an aside if you want to see how it should work watch the film 'brights lights, big city')


    is factchecking for magazines as in the film, not different, you have a much longer amount of time, compared to daily news.



    Take this example https://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=108763117&postcount=40 The Times Ireland wrote that a person was member of the Labour party when he had resigned from the party a month before, (I found this out by scrolling down his Facebook page and seeing his resignation letter) would you have done more checking then the Times did? He was still listed on the Labour website as an area rep, so you could forgive the reporter, but the article actually said he was Councillor, which he never was, would you have rung the Labour party to triple check he was still a member?, Its very strange that they wrote he was a member of the Labour party while also seeming to have gotten an unique quote directly from him!? https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/dublin-city-scrooges-scrap-lights-ceremony-9tb69w6fw

    The Times editor said that newspapers are produced at a certain speed but this wasn't a time dependent story it was just about not having one big Christmas lighting ceremony in Dublin, there was no need to rush.


  • #59
    L1011
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 69,537 ✭✭✭✭L1011


    The Labour site has a particular issue with how old pages are removed - the pages will still exist, just with no links from the site and search engines don't forget they exist. With proper search terms you'll probably find the entire Social Democrats party bar Murphy there.

    Its one of the older party sites out there core functionality wise (press releases back to 2000 for some reps etc) so would have some design choices from before the era of search engines actually working.

    So a basic check to see what "credentials" someone has could easily return outdated content; but confusing an LAR for a councillor is not something any journalist should ever do.


  • #60
    expectationlost
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 11,983 ✭✭✭✭expectationlost


    L1011 wrote: »
    The Labour site has a particular issue with how old pages are removed - the pages will still exist, just with no links from the site and search engines don't forget they exist. With proper search terms you'll probably find the entire Social Democrats party bar Murphy there.

    Its one of the older party sites out there core functionality wise (press releases back to 2000 for some reps etc) so would have some design choices from before the era of search engines actually working.

    So a basic check to see what "credentials" someone has could easily return outdated content; but confusing an LAR for a councillor is not something any journalist should ever do.

    it wasn't a case of an old page turning up from a search, https://www.labour.ie/search/?q=darryl+o%27callaghan he was listed on their people page as a Local Area Rep, it simply wasn't removed despite him having resigned (until I emailed them and told the of the confusion it was causing not to have deleted it yet).

    well I would forgive somebody perhaps absently minded writing Councillor instead of local area rep, but the Times Ireland editor told me the story went through 4 other people before it was published and none of them apparently spotted them stating somebody who wasn't a Councillor was a Councillor, I presume most of them live and work in Dublin and even if they didn't shouldn't there be some process for fact-checking this is what I've yet to find out.


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  • #61
    IRE60
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 1,882 ✭✭✭IRE60


    expectationlost wrote: »
    but the Times Ireland editor told me the story went through 4 other people before it was published and none of them apparently spotted them stating somebody who wasn't a Councillor was a Councillor

    You'd have to wonder where the buck stops. The primary source of data in an article would be from the journalist. So, what then is the role of those on the backbench - primarily the sub who is tasked to shoehorn the story into a given space - assigned by the chief-sub/page designer - and craft a headline in a given space.

    So, if the article has some 'fact' - 'Joe Bloggs, a Labour Councillor' - does the sub down tools and hit the Labour website to verify this? or 'Joe Bloggs, 45' - does he do a wiki search to verify the birthday? Where does the line of trust exist between the reporter and the sub?

    If a sub saw 'Joe Bloggs, a convicted fraudster' - I think he'd flag that for verification from the reporter as that would if incorrect fall into the realms of the Golden Arches.

    Again another anecdote: I was in a production environment ensuring that pages made their way to pre-press in an orderly and timely fashion. I noticed that a solicitor had recalled a page already past pre-press, so i had to take issue with this. Solicitor wanted a line rewritten in a story about an accident on the Quays.

    The line we had read (roughly) that a car collided with a Bus. The line change requested (and changed) was that 'the car and the bus were in a collision'. Its up to the courts, not the paper, to apportion blame- which we had done in the first instance. Should the sub have caught that? Is that a 'fact check


  • #62
    expectationlost
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 11,983 ✭✭✭✭expectationlost


    IRE60 wrote: »
    You'd have to wonder where the buck stops. The primary source of data in an article would be from the journalist. So, what then is the role of those on the backbench - primarily the sub who is tasked to shoehorn the story into a given space - assigned by the chief-sub/page designer - and craft a headline in a given space.

    So, if the article has some 'fact' - 'Joe Bloggs, a Labour Councillor' - does the sub down tools and hit the Labour website to verify this? or 'Joe Bloggs, 45' - does he do a wiki search to verify the birthday? Where does the line of trust exist between the reporter and the sub?

    If a sub saw 'Joe Bloggs, a convicted fraudster' - I think he'd flag that for verification from the reporter as that would if incorrect fall into the realms of the Golden Arches.

    Again another anecdote: I was in a production environment ensuring that pages made their way to pre-press in an orderly and timely fashion. I noticed that a solicitor had recalled a page already past pre-press, so i had to take issue with this. Solicitor wanted a line rewritten in a story about an accident on the Quays.

    The line we had read (roughly) that a car collided with a Bus. The line change requested (and changed) was that 'the car and the bus were in a collision'. Its up to the courts, not the paper, to apportion blame- which we had done in the first instance. Should the sub have caught that? Is that a 'fact check'


    well how do they prevent mistakes? how do they fact check? having the writer factcheck something is never going to be enough to prevent mistakes, newspapers have the benefit of multiple people working for them, thats what makes them different to anything else, thats what we're told.

    do modern print/digital CMS allow copy-marks along with the copy, like CQ or links to sources even if they are not published

    was that the in-house solicitor? its not a fact check its a 'legal' or at least an editorial issue.


  • #63
    Harry Palmr
    Closed Accounts Posts: 40,061 ✭✭✭✭Harry Palmr


    Der Spiegel certainly doesn't

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/19/top-der-spiegel-journalist-resigns-over-fake-interviews
    The German news magazine Spiegel has been plunged into chaos after revealing that one of its top reporters had falsified stories over several years.

    The media world was stunned by the revelations that the multi award-winning journalist Claas Relotius had, according to the weekly, “made up stories and invented protagonists” in at least 14 out of 60 articles that appeared in its print and online editions, warning that other outlets could also be affected.

    Relotius, 33, resigned after admitting to the scam. He had written for the magazine for seven years and won numerous awards for his investigative journalism, including CNN Journalist of the Year in 2014.


  • #64
    IRE60
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 1,882 ✭✭✭IRE60


    Harry Palmr wrote: »
    Der Spiegel certainly doesn't

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/19/top-der-spiegel-journalist-resigns-over-fake-interviews

    Harry, How timely! I just read the article and I watched a film about 6 months ago about a (possibly) New York times reporter who was caught - but then his life was taken over buy a guy writing under his name - I'll be back.. (with the name)


  • #65
    IRE60
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 1,882 ✭✭✭IRE60


    IRE60 wrote: »
    Harry, How timely! I just read the article and I watched a film about 6 months ago about a (possibly) New York times reporter who was caught - but then his life was taken over buy a guy writing under his name - I'll be back.. (with the name)

    https://m.imdb.com/title/tt2273657/

    True Story - great watch


  • #66
    expectationlost
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 11,983 ✭✭✭✭expectationlost


    Harry Palmr wrote: »
    Der Spiegel certainly doesn't

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/19/top-der-spiegel-journalist-resigns-over-fake-interviews


    in 2010 Der Spiegel was said to have the worlds largest fact checking team 80 people https://archives.cjr.org/behind_the_news/inside_the_worlds_largest_fact.php and still had 70 people on in 2017 https://digiday.com/media/inside-spiegels-70-person-fact-checking-team/

    heres an interview with the editor of the new republic at the time Stephen Glass was caught https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1509330 he says fact checking is meant to catch honest mistakes not deliberate fraud, but it really seems that he just let juicy stories that fit his world view be published and didin't check them


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  • #67
    expectationlost
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 11,983 ✭✭✭✭expectationlost


    apparently what these Glass's, Blairs and this new guy etc do what is known as "narrative journalism" its something I generally ignore.


  • #68
    Elmo
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 23,641 ✭✭✭✭Elmo


    One question on all of this:-

    If a journalist/columnist states that something happened them does/should the editor look for evidence?

    e.g. lets say a journalist is attacked should their editor look for CCTV footage of the act or get a second person to verify that they saw the attack? Or is it okay for a journalist to recount something that could be proven to be wrong in the future?


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