Fact-checking

Natural History, March, 2004 by Peter Brown

A couple of months ago I took a turn as a panelist on a TV talk show, looking back at some of the top science stories that broke in 2003. My fellow panelists were all seasoned science journalists, terrifically bright and well informed. If you watched the show, you'd come away with a pretty fair idea of what the stories we covered were all about.

What I found fascinating, though, was the way the show was put together. There's a term of art for it: "live to tape." It means just what it says--whatever happens "live," in front of the camera, is recorded for later broadcast. Actually, we did rehearse a few sections--the opening, the closing--but mostly we just winged it. At one point I had to explain "serotonin reuptake inhibitors" ("Let's see, does that mean there's more neurotransmitter in the neuron? Less?"). The moderator helped. But did we get it right? No one was around to check. The producers had neither the time nor the money to edit. The audience got it pretty, much the way we said it the first time.

I'm probably being naive, but to a print guy like me, that's absolutely frightening. In the magazine world, we live and die by our fact-checkers. That term is transparent as well: they keep the rest of us honest. They know where to find reliable information. They have a nose for hype and bull. Every line in every story in this magazine gets a fact-checker's scrutiny.

Of course, we still make mistakes. You'll film an especially embarrassing one in our February 2004 issue (see "Letters: Amendment," page 11). We reported in June--on the basis of the most reliable estimates we could find--that 170,000 objects were missing from the Iraq National Museum in Baghdad. That turned out to be hooey. The true number, as Zainab Bahrani carefully explains in this issue ("Lawless in Mesopotamia," page 44), is closer to 15,000. The signal-to-noise ratio, as my friend Dennis Flanagan puts it, is never infinite. But careful fact-checking makes the fidelity pretty high.

I don't mean to say that the difference between care and carelessness is a matter of the media themselves. It's not print vs. video vs. blog. Rather, it's the rhythm of the thing. All news, all the time, breeds rush, confusion, trivialization, addiction to the moment. There is, in contrast, a discipline to a print magazine, just as there is in science: a set of accepted procedures, canons of evidence, rules of inference, a body of common knowledge. Journalism is--or should be--much like science itself. Both seek the facts, and the understanding of the facts that comes with balance and impartiality. Both are--or should be-self-correcting. As Neil deGrasse Tyson notes in his column, "Nebulous Categories" (page 24), astronomers once thought all nebulae were part of our galaxy; now they agree many nebulae are other galaxies.

Isn't all this commonplace? But think: Are the facts important in voting for president? In deciding to go to war? In thinking about national priorities as reflected in the budget? If those of-us in "the media" abandon professional self-respect and join the blatherers who say whatever comes into their heads, why wouldn't we deserve the cynicism of those who think we just do it for the money?