Quote:
Originally Posted by AnotherCat
That is a new one for me; I've never seen "journalist" with either "with very high standards", or "always makes sure of his facts before publishing", let alone both, in the same sentence before.
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My older son used to be a journalist. He had high standards and made sure. But "always" is a pretty high standard -- actually, impossible. Everyone makes mistakes. The better the newspaper, the more corrections it publishes.
Having finished
Fear, I'm now most of the way through
All the President's Men. The latter convinces me that the earlier Woodward/Bernstein team always made sure. Now, once in a great while, they made a mistake. The mistake they write about the most (at least in the first 60 percent of the book) was one where they had four sources.
Here's how it works. Someone comes out of a meeting, and takes notes of what happened. My own job isn't political, but I do it fairly often. Maybe I put quotes around some of what I'm pretty sure I heard. Are the quotes rock-solid accurate? No. Are they pretty close? Usually.
When the notetaker doesn't like what he or she has heard, and doesn't think they've been treated well, they will call somebody like Bob Woodward (or wait until he calls them), and then share their notes. There's no claim that Woodward (and assistant/collaborator Evelyn Duffy) worked from recordings. So it's perfectly obvious that there are notetaking errors in the book. Plus, people don't all come out of a meeting, where there were disagreements, with the same memories. So there are mistaken quotations in journalism as in academic biographies. I see no reason to switch the bulk of my reading to fiction because of occasional mistakes. Of course, better authors make fewer mistakes.
Now, in
All the President's Men, what the standard of journalistic proof should be is a big topic of the book. In this new title, it's hardly mentioned. I guess that Woodward may have discussed it to death in his past seventeen non-fiction books. Since I've read few of them, I'd rather have seen the Woodward/Duffy fact check process discussed, at length, in
Fear. But since Woodward has gone into it in the past, I don't consider it exactly a flaw in this title.