Death of Fact Checking
Kevin at Truck and Barter has a great article where he fact checks a statistic he found in a "non-fiction" book. And what do you know, it was not only wrong, but way off. And, to make matters worse, changing the statistic to its correct value undermines much of the premise of the book:
What an utter refusal to check sources and validate simple statistics!
THIS IS NOT MY JOB, nor the job of any of Ms. Robbins' readers. It's
the job of the author and editors. I don't know if I should even bother
continuing to read the book at all, as I've spent 1/2 hour tracking
down just one horrendously wrong data point. How many more will be this
wrong???
My hypothesis is that this happens all the time, especially in media reports about various social ills. We have all suspected that if you add up all the people in articles that suffer from X or Y, it would include everyone in the country, probably three times over. Part of this is the very poor scientific and statistical background of most writers and editors. However, I think it also is a problem of skepticism. Editors and reporters don't necessarily have the time to fact-check everything, so they do a kind of triage using their own personal skepticism as a guide. And I think most reporters and editors are more than willing to believe that nearly every social ill discussed -- homelessness, teen suicide, drug abuse, hunger, etc. etc. -- are prevalent and getting worse, so they seldom really push back on relevant numbers for these issues. Most publishers and media outlets have pushed hard for diversity of skin color, but these groups remain pretty uniform in their outlook and basic assumptions about society, and so their failures of skepticism are pretty predictable.
BobH:
I once came across an article decrying the exploitation of women in Angeles City, Philippines (a notorious center of sexual tourism). The article cited a figure in the usual sensationalistic format that a woman was raped or murdered in Angeles every X minutes.
I worked out the numbers, checked the almanac, and wrote the author, pointing out that his numbers indicated that every man, woman and child in Angeles was raped and/or murdered several times a year. For my trouble, I got a blistering reply telling me that I didn't care about the plight of Filipino women.
November 17, 2006, 7:52 pmbradley:
I read your immigration posts,but they all seem to be closed to comment, I'm posting the following anyway, because a lot of interesting people (and opinionated!) read and post here...
(Sorry for the random-ness of this post)…
Four months ago I posted on many blogs, letting everyone know that we were trying to start a podcast (Rabbit Hole Daily) by people who had emigrated to other countries…
I thought it would be interesting to share all of our “misadventures†and news… I had hoped to get a contributor to/from every continent (i.e., a Brazilian in Japan, a Japanese person in France, a French person in Australia, etc.).
People leave their respective home-countries for all kinds of reasons; some people marry a “foreigner†and leave their country, some people take a job or do academic research out of their country, some are forced to leave for political reasons, some do it for the adventure. The podcast was designed to welcome all of these points of view. We’ve been working with mixed success to get all types of voices…
Podcasts are a great way to get complex stories out that would never make it onto tv or radio, and we’d like to use the medium to create something that’s informative, eclectic, and interesting, all voices and topics welcome (provided they’re well-written)!
At any rate, I’m writing to renew my call for contributors and say that we’re still around. We were accepted by itunes, we’ve been publishing consistently, and although we’ve had some technical concerns (people write articles, read them into a mic, then get them to me via internet or skype; getting it all edited evenly has been a challenge), we’ve just received some equipment donations by listeners that will make it possible to produce with ever-better audio quality.
Please consider listening to the podcast, and more importantly, contributing articles. (Articles are 2-3 pages, submitted 4-6 times per year, contributors are featured on our “contributor profiles†page, rules for contributing can be found on the “contribute here†portion.) If you know someone who has emigrated from their country of origin and is a good writer, please pass the word!
Thanks!
Bradley.
http://www.freewebs.com/rabbitholedaily
November 19, 2006, 6:21 amrabbitholedaily@hotmail.com
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