Craig Silverman tracks accuracy, errors & the craft of verification.
Someone at the Wall Street Journal can’t tell a Minotaur from a Cyclopes. As a result, the paper published a monstrous correction this week:
… Read moreThe Minotaur is a monster in Greek mythology that is part bull, part human. A travel article in Saturday’s Off Duty section mistakenly called it a one-eyed monster.
The Economist published a blog post that tried to show negative stereotypes of tourists from different countries are often untrue and unfair.
And by stereotypes, they mean:
Germans? Humourless and demanding. Americans? Loud with garish shorts. Chinese? Rude. Canadians? Actually Canadians are all quite nice. And the Brits? Drunken, violent louts
The original version of the article featured a picture of a young British fellow “on a night out in Mallorca.” This upset the man’s mother, and she contacted the publication to ask that it not tar him with the aforementioned “drunken, violent” brush.
Well, The Economist was only happy to comply. It changed the photo and added this note to the bottom of the story:
… Read moreNote: This blogpost was originally illustrated with a photograph of a young British man on a night out in Mallorca.
Here’s a wonderful backhanded correction from this week’s edition of the Cumbernauld News, of Scotland:
It’s getting pretty lively in Cumbernauld (via @vclxi67) pic.twitter.com/z8OMMhxLE6
— Jeremy Vine (@theJeremyVine) July 17, 2014
Vine is a broadcaster with the BBC, and the Twitter user he credits for finding the correction told me that it was published in this week’s edition of the paper. I emailed the paper to see if I can get more information about why Mrs. Masterson raised objections, and why the paper decided to issue the correction.… Read more
During the 2012 U.S. presidential debates, political journalists on Twitter primarily repeated candidate claims without providing fact checks or other context, according to new research published in The International Journal of Press/Politics.
Authors Mark Coddington, Logan Molyneux and Regina G. Lawrence analyzed tweets from 430 political journalists during the debates to see how much they engaged in the checking of candidate claims. The resulting paper is “Fact Checking the Campaign: How Political Reporters Use Twitter to Set the Record Straight (or Not).”
They also examined whether the political journalist’s tweets fell more into the construct of traditional objectivity or what they call “scientific objectivity,” which eschews he said/she said in favor of empirical statements and analysis, i.e fact checking.
They found that 60 percent of the journalist tweets “reflected traditional practices of ‘professional’ objectivity: stenography—simply passing along a claim made by a politician—and ‘he said, she said’ repetition of a politician’s claims and his opponent’s counterclaim.”
Journalists largely repeated the claims and statement of candidates, rather that check or challenge them.… Read more
Amnesty International is in the verification game and that is good news for journalism.
When journalists monitor and search social networks, they’re looking to discover and verify newsworthy content. Amnesty utilizes the same networks and content — but their goal is to gather and substantiate evidence of human rights abuses.
“Verification and corroboration was always a key component of human rights research,” said Christoph Koettl, the emergency response manager in Amnesty USA’s Crisis Prevention and Response Unit. “We always had to carefully review and corroborate materials, no matter if it’s testimony, written documents or satellite imagery.”
Now they’re “confronted with a torrent of potential new evidence” thanks to social networks and cell phones. As with their counterparts in newsrooms, human rights workers and humanitarian organizations must develop and maintain skills to verify the mass of user-generated content.… Read more
The Los Angeles Times offered a book review correction that’s jam packed with porn and penis references:
“Big Little Man”: A review in the June 29 Arts & Books section of the book “Big Little Man” said that author Alex Tizon is in his 60s. He is 54. Also, the review described Tizon as an avid consumer of porn, but the book says the viewing was for research. It also described Tizon’s friend’s embarrassment about the size of his endowment, whereas the book states that “he liked being average.”
Hat tip to Romenesko for spotting this.… Read more
Two weeks ago, CNBC aired a story and published a detailed article about what it called an “audacious,” “brazen,” sophisticated” and “unprecedented” cyberattack against a big hedge fund.
A company called BAE Systems Applied Intelligence said it had identified the attack, but declined to name the hedge fund involved.
CNBC correspondent Eamon Javers wrote the lengthy look at the incident and also appeared on air in a more than two-minute segment.
Maybe you can guess what happened next: Yesterday, Javers wrote a follow-up article to note that BAE subsequently admitted that the attack on the hedge fund never really happened. It was part of a “scenario” the company had laid out. From the company statement given to Javers:
… Read more“From the extensive amount of cyber incidents we deal with, we occasionally produce anonymized illustrative scenarios to help inform industry and the media.
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When Dan Schultz first described Truth Goggles close to three years go, he deemed it a “magic button” that could tell you “what is true and what is false on the web site you are viewing.”
That concept – which Schultz refers to as the “fact-check the Internet approach” – attracted a decent amount of press and enthusiasm at the time. Schultz shipped some related code as a result of him developing the project while at the MIT Media Lab.
Today, nearly three years later, he’s released the first Truth Goggles product — and it’s a departure from that original vision.
The Truth Goggles launching today is a tool to enable anyone to annotate an existing piece of online content to raise and answer questions about what’s been reported/written.… Read more
In May, the Ottawa Citizen published an op-ed from a university professor that began with an accusatory opening line: “David Bowie stole a piece of Canadian culture on Wednesday.”
It was dead wrong.
The piece claimed Bowie was personally responsible for having astronaut Chris Hadfield’s version of “Space Oddity” removed from YouTube. Professor Blayne Haggart wrote that “the world was only allowed to see the video because Bowie had granted Hadfield a one-year license to show it. On May 14, the license expired and Hadfield removed it from public view.”
Today, the paper apologized for the error. Turns out Bowie does not own the copyright for that song, and he in fact made efforts to try and get the owner to give the necessary permissions.… Read more
Lucas Myslinski was tired of having to fact check the questionable emails his father often forwarded to him.
“My dad would send these emails where they say something like, ‘Oh the government is stockpiling billions of dollars of ammunition’ and other things like that, where if all you would do is take a little time and look on Snopes you would find it’s not true,” Myslinski said.
That very problem has inspired projects such as LazyTruth, Truth Goggles, and Trooclick, all of which I wrote about last week, as well as the Washington Post’s TruthTeller. There’s a broad consensus that in a world of abundant, and often incorrect, information it would be valuable to have an app that “automatically monitors, processes, fact checks information and indicates a status of the information.”
Myslinski sketched out his ideas and then took the step of patenting them.… Read more