Poor fact-checking isn’t just the plague of websites and magazines. It’s disturbing the publishing industry. Just recently, several high-profile “experts” in their fields have promoted major factual errors in their books.
Due to a misunderstanding of historical terms, feminist author Naomi Wolf created “several dozen executions” that never happened.
Ex-New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson plagiarized passages and peddled factual errors in her ironically titled Merchants of Truth. (This should have come as no surprise to anyone who read her interview with New York magazine in which she boasted that she doesn’t need to record interviews.)
“Happiness expert” Paul Dolan based his entire book on a misunderstood statistic about married women being miserable, among other factual errors. (He thought spouses who were “separated” actually meant spouses were just in the other room when questions were being asked.)
Michael Wolff’s White House tell-all was similarly riddled with errors. And that’s just from this past year.
As detailed in a feature from the New York Times, these recent publishing flubs are disturbing writers and editors alike. Publishing houses don’t like to pay for fact-checkers, but neither do writers with modest advances. So who’s going to check?
As costly as fact-checking may be, it’s much more costly to reprint books or pull them from circulation. In both Wolf’s and Dolan’s cases, their entire theses fell apart upon scrutiny. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt had all the U.S. copies of Wolf’s book recalled. Dolan merely pledged to correct his book.
Though some publishing houses may balk at the bother of fact-checking, a senior editor at Amazon Publishing, Barry Harbaugh, told the Times that the company has paid to fact-check many of its nonfiction titles.
“A lot of the time we talk about fact-checking in this defensive framework, like when something horribly wrong happens,” Harbaugh said. “But it’s also a way to lay many more hands on a story that’s being sculpted from facts, and it’s qualitatively improving the piece.”
What are readers to take away from all this? The publishing industry deserves as much scrutiny as other forms of media. The mere fact that it’s in a book does not make it any more reliable than what you can find anywhere else. Malcolm Gladwell shared an inaccurate statistic about poets’ suicide rates by quoting a paper, which cited a book, which created the statistic based on three dozen poets who lived about 300 years ago. All it took to find the error was a little digging by The Atlantic‘s Andrew Ferguson. If something sounds wrong, check it out.
For those in the publishing industry, the takeaway is that writers and editors will have to come up with a better way to make sure that fact-checking happens early and thoroughly, so maybe they can restore the trust between writers and their readers.
