fabrication is the ultimate sin of journalism
February 26, 2016 10:32 AM Subscribe
The bombshell accusations left anyone who'd ever worked with Thompson wondering if he'd scammed them too. It's a tricky question to untangle, noted Josh Marshall, the editor and publisher of the liberal online publication Talking Points Memo, which had published one of his essays. "One of the dirty little secrets of fact-checking," Marshall wrote in an editor's note, "is that it is quite difficult to uncover a determined effort to deceive." Juan Thompson Wrote About St. Louis for the National Media. But Were Any of His Stories True?
Archive link.
The Intercept's note to readers about the deception, archived here.
The Washington Post: How the media dealt with The Intercept’s retracted story on Dylann Roof’s "cousin." Archived here.
Archive link.
The Intercept's note to readers about the deception, archived here.
The Washington Post: How the media dealt with The Intercept’s retracted story on Dylann Roof’s "cousin." Archived here.
Fact-checking isn't all that hard. It just requires patience, time and money. Unfortunately those are in very short supply these days.
posted by sardonyx at 11:12 AM on February 26, 2016 [6 favorites]
posted by sardonyx at 11:12 AM on February 26, 2016 [6 favorites]
I always thought St. Louis sounded too good to be a real place.
posted by Naberius at 11:17 AM on February 26, 2016 [3 favorites]
posted by Naberius at 11:17 AM on February 26, 2016 [3 favorites]
Yeah, everybody knows that you can't put an elevator in a giant arch. The people riding it would get dumped upside-down on the other side.
posted by Strange Interlude at 11:33 AM on February 26, 2016 [8 favorites]
posted by Strange Interlude at 11:33 AM on February 26, 2016 [8 favorites]
Yeah, came in here to say how happy I am it's not Hunter's Juan!
posted by nevercalm at 12:06 PM on February 26, 2016
posted by nevercalm at 12:06 PM on February 26, 2016
The people riding it would get dumped upside-down on the other side.
That's ridiculous, the engineering problem was solved simply by putting the elevator car through a tesseract inversion at the apex of the arch. Juan wisely decided that truthfully reporting on the output results of that elevator ride were far too... unsettling to recount with full unfettered truthfulness, and the general public has until now been blissfully unaware of the nightmarish mech-arcanism that hellish device has let loose upon the greater St. Louis metropolitan area. Until, that is, someone started digging into the black archives of the aptly named Intercept and the grotesque reality has been made known.
posted by FatherDagon at 12:34 PM on February 26, 2016 [3 favorites]
That's ridiculous, the engineering problem was solved simply by putting the elevator car through a tesseract inversion at the apex of the arch. Juan wisely decided that truthfully reporting on the output results of that elevator ride were far too... unsettling to recount with full unfettered truthfulness, and the general public has until now been blissfully unaware of the nightmarish mech-arcanism that hellish device has let loose upon the greater St. Louis metropolitan area. Until, that is, someone started digging into the black archives of the aptly named Intercept and the grotesque reality has been made known.
posted by FatherDagon at 12:34 PM on February 26, 2016 [3 favorites]
From the comments: "I thought something was off about this guy's stories for an admittedly minor reason--he referenced in one of them growing up in "West St. Louis". I lived in St. Louis for almost three decades and never encountered anyone who used that phrase for Wells-Goodfellow".
Likewise. West St. Louis? It sounds funny just saying it. I guess he's writing for a national audience, not an STL one, and nobody outside of STL knows what Wells-Goodfellow means, so maybe it's easier for outsiders to understand. But neighborhoods mean something to people in STL that outsiders don't understand, and if the guy is fudging his neighborhood, that's... interesting.
____
There have been a bunch of cases like this involving activist journalism, going back to Steve Glass's piece on the church of George H. W. Bush. The journalist seems to think that fictionalizing minor details in service of a greater truth is justified. But that's the whole point of journalism: the minor details are true. I mean, there's a ton of fiction making any given point. But skeptics can dismiss fiction by saying "that's not actually how it is". With journalism, you're supposed to be able to respond "yes, it IS how it really is".
posted by kevinbelt at 12:37 PM on February 26, 2016 [2 favorites]
Likewise. West St. Louis? It sounds funny just saying it. I guess he's writing for a national audience, not an STL one, and nobody outside of STL knows what Wells-Goodfellow means, so maybe it's easier for outsiders to understand. But neighborhoods mean something to people in STL that outsiders don't understand, and if the guy is fudging his neighborhood, that's... interesting.
____
There have been a bunch of cases like this involving activist journalism, going back to Steve Glass's piece on the church of George H. W. Bush. The journalist seems to think that fictionalizing minor details in service of a greater truth is justified. But that's the whole point of journalism: the minor details are true. I mean, there's a ton of fiction making any given point. But skeptics can dismiss fiction by saying "that's not actually how it is". With journalism, you're supposed to be able to respond "yes, it IS how it really is".
posted by kevinbelt at 12:37 PM on February 26, 2016 [2 favorites]
An interesting question is, how much journalism is continuous with this while not severe enough to give rise to scandal. Is it really important that all the small details are literal truth? Or is it enough that fudged details are minor or inessential? Janet Malcolm got in a big court case over this, and while I very much admire her I'm not sure how I feel about her argument and this aspect of her practice.
posted by grobstein at 12:57 PM on February 26, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by grobstein at 12:57 PM on February 26, 2016 [2 favorites]
"Is it really important that all the small details are literal truth?"
A good question, particularly in light of the "precisely-arched eyebrows" issue a few days ago.
posted by kevinbelt at 1:32 PM on February 26, 2016
A good question, particularly in light of the "precisely-arched eyebrows" issue a few days ago.
posted by kevinbelt at 1:32 PM on February 26, 2016
An interesting question is, how much journalism is continuous with this while not severe enough to give rise to scandal.
Given the way journalists inevitably reveal themselves to be near-total ignoramuses whenever they venture into subjects I actually know something about, sometimes getting the broad strokes sort of right while invariably making hash of the details, I assume they are probably full of shit all the time and not just when I happen to be able to catch them at it. How much does it matter whether the details are wrong because they were lazy in this fashion instead of being lazy in that fashion? Not that there's anything especially wrong with laziness, mind - it's just a matter of making economical decisions with one's time - but it seems reasonable to expect it of journalists and discount their credibility ahead of time rather than to demand the impossible and crucify them when they fail to deliver.
posted by Mars Saxman at 4:07 PM on February 26, 2016
Given the way journalists inevitably reveal themselves to be near-total ignoramuses whenever they venture into subjects I actually know something about, sometimes getting the broad strokes sort of right while invariably making hash of the details, I assume they are probably full of shit all the time and not just when I happen to be able to catch them at it. How much does it matter whether the details are wrong because they were lazy in this fashion instead of being lazy in that fashion? Not that there's anything especially wrong with laziness, mind - it's just a matter of making economical decisions with one's time - but it seems reasonable to expect it of journalists and discount their credibility ahead of time rather than to demand the impossible and crucify them when they fail to deliver.
posted by Mars Saxman at 4:07 PM on February 26, 2016
Is it really important that all the small details are literal truth? Or is it enough that fudged details are minor or inessential?
If you like thinking about this kind of thing, Lifespan of a Fact is, in addition to being one of the most unique books I have ever read, an excellent way to explore the relationship between "Fact" and "Truth."
posted by dersins at 5:40 PM on February 26, 2016 [2 favorites]
If you like thinking about this kind of thing, Lifespan of a Fact is, in addition to being one of the most unique books I have ever read, an excellent way to explore the relationship between "Fact" and "Truth."
posted by dersins at 5:40 PM on February 26, 2016 [2 favorites]
> There have been a bunch of cases like this involving activist journalism, going back to Steve Glass's piece on the church of George H. W. Bush.
Oh, it goes back way before that. Claud Cockburn, a wonderful and hilarious writer (I highly recommend his autobiography I, Claud...), was a Communist and was unashamed of having lied about events in the Spanish Civil War to promote the cause—proud of it, in fact. Some people think facts are just details to be shaded or invented in the service of a Higher Truth, others think facts are facts and once you start messing with them you're just a plain liar, and never the twain shall meet. (And as interesting as it is to investigate the messy terrain between fact and non-fact, it's usually an irrelevant distraction in these cases, because the journalists in question are not carrying on that philosophical investigation, they're just faking it to make themselves or the Cause look better.)
posted by languagehat at 5:04 PM on February 27, 2016
Oh, it goes back way before that. Claud Cockburn, a wonderful and hilarious writer (I highly recommend his autobiography I, Claud...), was a Communist and was unashamed of having lied about events in the Spanish Civil War to promote the cause—proud of it, in fact. Some people think facts are just details to be shaded or invented in the service of a Higher Truth, others think facts are facts and once you start messing with them you're just a plain liar, and never the twain shall meet. (And as interesting as it is to investigate the messy terrain between fact and non-fact, it's usually an irrelevant distraction in these cases, because the journalists in question are not carrying on that philosophical investigation, they're just faking it to make themselves or the Cause look better.)
posted by languagehat at 5:04 PM on February 27, 2016
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