Art of fact-checking destined to remain an elusive concept

Berl Falbaum

It seems like the mainstream media is in the news as much these days as the people and events they cover.

First, within the last couple of weeks, we had Ann Telnaes, an editorial cartoonist resigning from The Washington Post, because she was offended when the paper rejected a cartoon that mocked the paper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon. As I recently wrote, she gave the word “chutzpah” (Jewish for gall, audacity) an entirely new meaning.

Now come two new controversies. One involves The New York Times rejecting an advertisement and the other, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta CEO, ending fact-checking on Facebook, Instagram, and other Meta platforms.

We’ll deal with The Times case first. The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a Quaker organization, wanted to place an ad in the paper, calling for an end to Israel’s “genocide” in Gaza.

The Times refused the ad, suggesting that AFSC change “genocide” to “war” because, the paper said, “Various international bodies, human rights organizations and governments have different views on the situation. In line with our commitment to factual accuracy and adherence to legal standards, we must ensure that all advertising content complies with these widely applied definitions.”

AFSC huffed and puffed in a press release, asking: “Why is it not acceptable to publicize the meticulously documented atrocities committed by Israel and paid for by the United States?”

The answer: It is perfectly acceptable to publicize what AFSC considers Israel’s abuses in the war with Hamas, but The Times has no obligation — legal or otherwise — to provide the organization with a platform.

The Times is a private enterprise and like all media institutions makes literally thousands of decisions daily on what to publish, where to publish articles (page one or deep in the paper), or not to publish at all. And those decisions include advertisements.

Years ago, I had a go-around with the student newspaper at Brandeis University, a Jewish institution, when it published a Holocaust denier ad. The paper cited “freedom of the press” as its defense and I responded, the Holocaust deniers have a constitutional right to their views but the paper did not have to help them disseminate them.

The 10 words in the First Amendment devoted to freedom of the press — “Congress shall make no law respecting…freedom of the press…” — are designed to protect the press from government intervention. The remaining 35 words deal with freedom of religion, the right to assembly, and to petition the government for redress of grievances.

Under the guarantee of a free press, private organizations can make their decisions and as long as they don’t engage in libel or other violations (copyright infringements, invasion of privacy, etc.) they do not owe anyone an explanation.  

I am going to guess that AFSC has a newsletter or magazine and that it would not publish an ad or article that defends Israel. And I support that right.

One more point: Press freedom applies to everyone not just media institutions. Even protesters distributing flyers at political rallies enjoy that protection.

(I thank my valued friend, former Detroit Congressman William Brodhead, for reminding me of that point after my column on Telnaes.)  

Now, to Meta and fact-checking. Zuckerberg created a brouhaha with his announcement to end that practice. First, an admission: I am computer illiterate when it comes to social media. I have never Facebooked, Headbooked, Toebooked, Instagrammed, Tweeted, Tiked or Toked. When my grandchildren ask me to text them, I seek help from the 4-year-old next door.

When the headlines screamed, “Meta Ends Fact-Checking,” I reacted with puzzlement. So what? Why? There are 1,279 daily newspapers and 5,147 weeklies in the U.S. (Source: Wikipedia) and I feel safe to say, none has any fact-checkers.  

I understand that the mainstream media has filtering processes to assure accuracy while the social media does not. The latter is more like an international Hyde Park Speakers’ Corner (London) where anyone can hold forth and, agreed, extremely powerful in the internet era.

It is impossible to check the thousands of stories published by daily papers and, of course, do so in the few minutes before publication. Each organization would have to create duplicate staffs just to recheck all the facts in stories and if all the quotes were accurate. Simply not possible. Editors have no choice but to trust that their writers are reporting accurately. (And, overall, they perform admirably.)

Here is what the Columbia Journalism Review has said on fact-checking: “…[I]t is virtually impossible to rigorously report the day’s news, edit a story, and then hand it over to a fact-checker to be verified in time to print a paper the next day—or an article the next hour.”

When I was teaching journalism courses at Wayne State University, one of my standard assignments was for students to fact-check published stories. They were, at times, appalled by what they found. Here are some “biggies” from over the years:

• A local paper ran a page one story on how one of its reporters, covering a drug raid, was kidnapped and held hostage. Not true; it was a fabrication.

• At the same paper, a columnist wrote a piece on two famous professional basketball players attending a college championship game and cheering for their school. Not true; a fabrication. They weren’t even at the game. In an apology, the columnist wrote he made an “assumption,” more commonly known as a lie.

• Another local paper, when space flight was still covered, ran a piece on a lift-off, describing it as beautiful. Not true; a fabrication. The flight had been scrubbed.

Even the Pulitzer Prize Committee doesn’t fact-check. It once awarded its prestigious prize to Janet Leslie Cooke, of The Washington Post, for a story she had manufactured, on an 8-year-old heroin addict. (She admitted her guilt and returned the prize.)

In my decades in this business, I have been involved in dozens of stories that contained errors, some minor, some serious. Two stand out: in the first, almost every major “fact” was wrong; the second, broadcast by a local TV station, was downright dishonest.

There are exceptions to fact-checking in the mainstream media. Some weekly and monthly academic journals and even news magazines employ fact-checkers. They can do so because they do not have unforgiving deadlines nor do they deal with the volume of the mainstream media.

These publications have the time to fact-check and doing so enhances their reputations. But they are not flawless either. (For instance, Rolling Stone was found guilty of defamation for a story of an alleged gang rape that turned out to be false.)

So, while these “controversies” whet the appetites of the media, let’s save our outrage for more important causes. There is no shortage of them. And that’s a fact.

––––––––––––––––––––
Subscribe to the Legal News!
http://www.legalnews.com/Home/Subscription
Full access to public notices, articles, columns, archives, statistics, calendar and more
Day Pass Only $4.95!
One-County $80/year
Three-County & Full Pass also available