Slate’s editor, Jacob Weisberg did an interview with PR Week UK, a trade journal about the public relations industry, and had some interesting things to say about accuracy in the media. Here’s the pertinent excerpt:
PRWeek: Blogs are publishing very quickly,
and newspapers are publishing slowly. Is the move for successful online
companies going toward the middle?
Weisberg: It’s a
different model of investigation and discovering the truth. A lot of
the traditional media feel very threatened by blogs. And the web, in
general, and blogs, in particular, raise the price of error for
journalists, both online and in print. While an individual blog may be
inaccurate, unfair, or dishonest, the collective intelligence of the
web and thousands of people picking apart anything they see in print
makes journalists more careful. When you make a mistake now, there’s
almost no chance of it going unnoticed. And when it is noticed, you’ll
be humiliated in public. Blogs have made entities like The New York Times
more accurate and forthcoming about acknowledging errors that occur.
… It’s a kind of fact checking that you’d never get from a [media]
fact-checking department. Certainly the idea of publishing first and
fact checking second makes a lot of people uncomfortable for good
reason. It’s certainly not the approach that Slate takes. We make every
effort to ensure everything we publish is absolutely true, as much as
any print publication. I would put our record for accuracy up against
just about any publication. I would also put our forthrightness and
transparency in acknowledging and correcting errors up against just
about any publication. My point is that it’s a hobby for a whole group
of people to catch the mainstream media out. People love to find
mistakes, and we’re on the receiving end of that as well. We invite
readers to find mistakes in Slate. And when I write something now, I am
much more careful than I ever was in my years as a print journalist at
double-checking everything and not assuming it’s true. You just know
now if you try to gloss something over, you’ll get caught, and it’s
going to be embarrassing.
There’s no disputing that the web and blogs have had an impact on the accuracy of the media. And, yes, there are some sad souls who spend an inordinate amount of time searching for and highlighting errors. And corrections. Pathetic.
Weisberg paints a bit of a target on himself when he says he’ll "put our record for accuracy up against
just about any publication. I would also put our forthrightness and
transparency in acknowledging and correcting errors up against just
about any publication."
True, we haven’t found many clunkers on Slate over the last year. (FYI here are our two favorite Slate corrections.) Keep in mind, however, that Slate publishes far less stories than your average daily newspaper. Less stories published = less opportunities for errors. Then there’s the time Slate published an article about "monkeyfishing" that contained several fabrications. Slate defended the story until the New York Times ran this article. You can read the monkeyfishing article here, and Slate’s apology here. (Weisberg was not the editor in chief at the time.)
