"If your mother says she loves you, check it out."If the permanent mark is too extreme, laying down the rule I suggested will suffice: No more reporting on people making assertions of fact without checking out the facts. Here's why.
Local news outlets have a very bad practice of reporting as fact things that are not facts and it seems to be getting worse. (Some very recent examples here, here, here, here, here and here). Most recently [emphasis added]...
News & Record, January 21, 2010:
Alston denies bringing the company, XMG Online, to the county or helping it win the contract. Alston said he does know XMG CEO Calvin Williams Jr., who went to Dudley High with Alston’s son.News & Record, January 22, 2010:
Although Alston has said Williams attended Dudley High School with his son, Williams said he went to school in his native state of Maryland.In the first story, it was a "fact" that Williams went to Dudley, in the next story: "wait a minute, back up," that's what someone said and it may be wrong. If you have been following this story, you'll recognize that this matters greatly because, with hardly anything to go on beyond their own suspicions, people had been trying to make hay out of the website problems by casting aspersions on County Commissioner Chairman Skip Alston and website designer Calvin Williams. They've implied that Alston got Williams the job because they knew each other. Commissioner Billy Yow has gone so far as to call for an S.B.I. investigation. That's county politics, I suppose, but those kinds of fact-free-inspired conspiracy theories should not get an assist from the local press. Reporters should be here to add clarity, not cause greater confusion. (see: Greensboro Police, black book).
Whatever one's opinions on this particular story (we still don't have all the facts), it is fundamental to journalism that you never, never, ever, report something as fact that you got from a single source. Even I know that. If the assertion is the kind of thing that should be found in some record or report, you check the original source. Barring that, if you have to rely on people's personal knowledge, you use multiple sources -- and you better make damn sure your sources are not all just repeating something they, themselves, heard from the same single source (see: Iraq, WMD, Chalibi/Cheney/Miller).
A couple of things.
ReplyDeleteIn the first instance, the reference should be read this way:
"Alston said he does know XMG CEO Calvin Williams Jr., who went to Dudley with Alston son."
The word "said," in this instance, related to both Alston saying that he knows Williams and his saying that he went to Dudley with his son.
Writing it this way prevents your having to use the word "said" twice in the first sentence and is commonly understood -- and has been by all the principles in this story so far.
The other option is write it like this:
"Alston said he does know XMG CEO Calvin Williams Jr., who Alston said went to Dudley High with Alston's son."
That's three Alston's and two saids in one sentence. I'd avoid that where possible. You already have two males being referenced so a "his" or a "he" gets sticky too.
These are all just style things, but believe me we hear it from readers when we write it the other way.
If I'd wanted to state it as a fact on my own authority I'd have written it this way, which would be even clearer and more economical:
"Alston said he does know XMG CEO Calvin Williams Jr. Williams went to Dudley High with Alston's son."
My choice not to do that was deliberate. If I had decided to do that I'd have sourced it at the end of the sentence anyway, as in "according to Dudley High School officials."
I did contact Dudley to confirm this, incidentally. They did not respond to my request and still haven't. I did contact Williams to verify Alston's comment. He said he'd been advised not to say anything more than he'd already said.
So my choice was -- not use Alston's account of how he knew someone which I'd already attributed to him because I couldn't verify it independently with the school or Williams or use it and attribute it. In the interest of letting readers know what Alston, a principle in the story, was saying, I wrote it the way I did.
But to another point -- as a journalist I can tell you that you do often have to report something that you got from a single source, though of course you should source it in the article and not report it as a fact when possible.
If you ask someone how they know someone else, something of which they have personal knowledge and do not need to and usually could not confirm for themselves through documentation, you can usually feel pretty confident in reporting that they have said.
In this particular case Alston was himself confused and later realized it and apologized to me for having mistaken Williams for someone else. It was always possible Alston was lying about how he knew him altogether -- maybe he knew him for much longer -- and so I made sure to report that he said that and not that it was a fact.
I've spoken to a lot of readers about this - online, through e-mail, on the phone -- and no one has so far been confused by this. All of them have said: "Well, doesn't Alston say he knew him from Dudley?" without my having to correct their saying: "Didn't he go to Dudley?"
Joe,
ReplyDeleteI have little patience anymore for the excuses for a lack of precision. "It would take to many words to accuraetly convey the meaning," just doesn't fly.
Furthermore, that doesn't ameliorate your lack of fact checking. Even if you intended to make clear that it was Alston who was saying that Calvin went to high school at Dudley, you recognized the need to corroborate this information, as demonstrated by your attempts to do so, but rain with it even when you could not corroborate it. I recognize that that is quite allowable at the N&R, but it's a terrible practice, that violates the basic tenants of journalism. You should not allow people to make assertions of fact without checking them out. It's that simple.
The end result, no matter what excuses you proffer, is that something wrong appeared in an article you wrote.