The Importance of Fact-Checking
84 comments
·April 1, 2025Isamu
Aunche
This was a different case, but Fox News did have to pay almost 800 million to Dominion to settle the lawsuit about rigged voting machines. There Tucker did admit in text that the allegations were ridiculous, but reported them as if they were true anyways.
roenxi
That was a bit weird for the US system though. There is the obvious element that topical cable news political reporting is nearly wall-to-wall misinformation and it is often hard to tell if it was the politicians or the news operations that were most responsible. They've already hit an equilibrium where everyone appears to be doing their best to be wilfully stupid to obscure whether they are lying or just that dumb.
For the legal system to single out the Dominion Voting thing as an issue was ... acceptable but probably a misfire. Of all the craziness, hysterics targeting voting machines was the issue most likely to accidentally be a net good for the US system.
gotoeleven
And here's the same thing for rachel maddow
https://www.bizpacreview.com/2019/12/28/rachel-maddows-defen...
gcp123
What makes this fascinating isn't just what it says about storytelling, but what it reveals about our relationship with truth in media. I worked in public radio for 7 years, and TAL's influence was impossible to overstate - every producer wanted to craft stories with that perfect narrative arc.
The Daisey episode still haunts journalism programs. We used it as a case study in our ethics workshops. The truly unsettling part wasn't just Daisey's fabrications, but how perfectly those lies fit into TAL's storytelling template - dramatic scenes, sympathetic characters, narrative tension, and a tidy resolution that makes you feel something.
Glass wasn't wrong about storytelling's power to make people listen. But the Daisey incident showed its dangers - when your format rewards emotional impact and narrative elegance, you create incentives for sources to deliver exactly that, truthful or not.
The saddest part is that real stories about Foxconn's labor conditions existed that could have been told without fabrication. But they wouldn't have had that perfect "old man touching an iPad for the first time" moment that makes for such a perfect radio beat.
rayiner
How has the story about the Duke Lacrosse players been processed in the journalism schools?
jfengel
And the story is in fact largely true. Daisey is a storyteller, not a journalist, and TAL is not a news program.
The lesson for journalists is that this isn't journalism, and the first clue is that it didn't come from a journalistic source. Listeners should have found that suspicious from the get-go... and so should Glass.
TAL screwed up. And the worst part is it fits a narrative in which NPR is a propaganda source, which is eagerly gobbled up by people who themselves are being uncritical.
glenstein
The story was true is your takeaway? A key piece of the article is that Rob Schmitz of Marketplace listened, thought something was off, and after digging found 13 lies in the story:
>Schmitz met Cathy in Shenzhen, where the bulk of Daisey’s story unraveled. Child laborers? The translator says she and the monologist never saw any. Workers suffering from chemical poisoning? “No. Nobody mentioned n-hexane.” The man with the gnarled hand. “No, this is not true. Very emotional. But not true.
This American Life abso-fudging-lutely is intending to tell true stories. The fact that the audio medium has an emotional impact does not by itself push the medium into fiction, which is a completely wild extrapolation to be making.
jfengel
I'm drawing a narrow but crucial distinction between telling true stories and journalism.
Journalism sets a higher bar. It has to not only tell the truth, but to tell it in a way that informs rather than entertains. That can be messy and dull. It doesn't let you connect things with speculation, even if you identify it as speculation. You can't even quite somebody's speculation unless you've ascertained their sincerity.
That's a very high bar that genuine journalists still hold to. It's unfortunate that this is usually boring and nobody wants to pay for it, and so much of what passes for "news" doesn't even try, but journalists do exist.
TAL tells stories. They are supposed to be truthful and never just outright lie the way Daisey did. But they don't have to double confirm every fact. They have a lot more leeway to shape a story by omission, speculation, opinion, etc. They don't practice journalism, though they do not explicitly say so. And by appearing in a medium best known for its journalism (genuine journalism), by stepping over the line they obliterated it.
So I'm trying to draw some careful distinctions. They did screw up, but not just in the obvious fashion. It's a story they should never have fun, not because of the lies (the second mistake) but because it's not their wheelhouse (the first mistake). They should have handed that story off to an actual journalist. Then later Daisey could have reported it his way, though he'd still be required not to simply fabricate. He would, however, have well attested sources.
pessimizer
> The story was true is your takeaway?
I think this was the takeaway of the entire industry. Daisey gave an admission that was basically a performance, and the message of that performance was "I was dishonest, and being dishonest is terribly morally wrong, but being dishonest made the story more true, and if therefore I have to be morally wrong to deliver the real truth, I'll have to take the blame."
Typical middle-class post-mortem after getting caught.
That happened during a time when we expected the mainstream news to be literally true, even if told from a particular perspective. If Daisey's story were politically valuable to someone today, however, every outlet would simply agree not to report on it. They'd just refer back to it in articles about Foxconn as "allegations spread around right-wing twitter about the supposed bias of a journalist who reported the story."
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cratermoon
The funny thing is, Daisey was not the first time narrative journalism – aka documentary media – has waltzed down the path to fiction. Famously, we have the film Nanook of the North and the book Wisconsin Death Trip, case studies I covered when I was in journalism program, before TAL. Today, we might call these works docudrama, but the blurring of the line between drama and journalism remains.
otterley
Everyone gets things wrong sometimes. As important as getting things right is, nobody is perfect. Then, how you react when you make a mistake matters. You can cover up the truth, dissemble, point fingers, or—best of all—be humble and honest and apply the lessons learned in the future.
Kudos to Ira and his team for doing the right thing after realizing they did the wrong thing.
glenstein
And to your point, if you are watching this, and trying to cynically use a one-off example to discredit years of reliable journalism, that too is a moment of character, and I think as important as the story itself.
tmoertel
It would be telling, however, to quantify the reliability of those “years of reliable journalism” by fact checking a random sample of the stories told over those years. According to the article we are discussing, TAL started using professional fact checkers only after the discovery of the Daisey incident. We’re assuming that stories aired prior to that event are reliable, but we haven’t verified that belief, have we?
glenstein
So that's exactly the kind of over correction in the wrong direction that I'm talking about. I don't think I agree that that's the pertinent extrapolation here. We absolutely would benefit from that spot checking. But I don't think the implication should be that 100% or something near it of the previous articles are fabricated, or under the cloud of deep suspicion until proven otherwise. The same things that led to this particular story unraveling, are vulnerabilities that could have led to other stories unraveling.
If we get a second and a third, I think you might be right to have that cloud of suspicion. That would be like a Shattered Glass scenario and we're not there yet.
poincaredisk
>You can cover up the truth, dissemble, point fingers, or—best of all—be humble and honest
If covering up the truth works, why would you risk telling the truth? At worst, the outcome is the same (minor scandal). At best, in most cases, nobody ever learns about the lie. The rational choice is to never tell the truth until it's completely obvious you lied, they e okay dumb.
(Sorry for cynicism. I don't really think like that)
paulpauper
I think this is different. Getting something wrong in journalism is not like a mistake practicing an instrument: reputations and careers are at stake. it calls into doubt the integrity of the whole program.
pards
The title refers to the January 6, 2012 episode, beginning about halfway through the article:
> “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory” is mesmerizing and flawlessly produced. It became the most-downloaded episode of This American Life. There was only one problem. In almost every salient detail, the story was a fabrication.
On March 16, 2012, This American Life, aired the “Retraction” covering Rob Schmitz’s deconstruction of Daisey’s piece (he uncovered at least thirteen lies).
“Immediately after that we started working with professional fact-checkers,” said Glass.
pstuart
That they were horrified by the mistake and set out to address it publicly and work to prevent future mistakes is telling.
This American Life is a treasure.
glenstein
Mike Daisey, the fabricator in question, had a completely headspinning excuse:
>Everything I have done making this monologue for the theater has been to make people care. I’m not going to say I didn’t take a few shortcuts in my passion to be heard. But I stand behind the work. It’s theater. I use the tools of theater to achieve its dramatic arc, and of that arc and that work, I am very proud, because I think I made you care, Ira, and I think I made you want to delve.
It's reminiscent of Hasan Minhaj's 'emotional truths'. Just such a casual abandonment of objective reality as if that's not going to set off nuclear-level alerts.
hydrogen7800
Or the vice president saying "if I have to create stories so the American media actually pays attention, then that's what I'm going to do." https://youtu.be/vVJ_Icosa3s?si=urohSO8q_iLFJpg2
pstuart
That could be given a pass if the stories were not complete lies and that the attention brought wasn't deeply damaging to the community it addressed.
It's a pity that it worked. A nation of immigrants is now virulently anti-immigrant.
wat10000
Sadly, it’s nothing new. We’ve always welcomed some immigrants and hated others. The specific groups have just changed throughout the years.
stickfigure
Or Mao's belief that revolutionary zeal alone will nonsense projects like backyard iron furnaces somehow work.
kjellsbells
Another excellent example of the TAL format gone wrong: the Caliphate podcast series by the New York Times. Conpelling narrative, hot topic, built on quicksand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caliphate_%28podcast%29?wprov=...
You can still find it on Spotify, with a mea culpa attached.
https://open.spotify.com/show/1QLjI1ptUhPEIYaaiJgZlh?si=1XK5...
didgetmaster
Almost every contentious issue has a set of facts that support one side of the argument, while also having a set of facts that support the other side.
More often than not, a biased story is one that focuses exclusively on one set of facts while completely ignoring the other set. Fact checkers may catch falsehoods that are reported as facts, but they rarely point out obvious ommissions.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF
I guess. I'm not convinced by the facts on the other side of LGBTQ discourse. Is it really true I could be arrested in Florida because my driver's license says I'm female? It doesn't protect anyone. It doesn't make anyone's life better.
IshKebab
Not sure what discourse or side you're talking about, but... no the Florida police are not arresting everyone whose driving license says they are female. Obviously.
IshKebab
Yeah but sometimes the facts are entirely fabricated, as is the case here.
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bitwize
Except the right have been shown, time and again, to outright lie.
Joel_Mckay
In many ways, a half-truth is worse than a simple lie, and there is no guarantee all parties are wrong in their own way:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Poems_of_John_Godfrey_Sax...
Media tends to interview the most outrageous looking imbecile they can find at any event... regardless of political affiliation. The Sinclair Broadcast Group helps local news maintain consistent messaging, and thus any mistakes intentional or not are less noticeable.
Fact-checking is only as good as the data sources people find. There are groups that ran entire fake scientific journals to sell the public outright nonsense.
Verifiable facts are difficult to validate. "AI"/LLM slop content just made it worse =3
didgetmaster
Those who do not understand how AI works might think that it might correct all the falsehoods that come along. But if an LLM is trained on data full of errors and falsehoods, then the resulting model will only reenforce them rather than correct them.
blindriver
No one cares about facts anymore. They care about vibes and whether what is saying matches their vibes.
That's why no one reads past the reddit title or the Google news headline.
I don't know how we get past this, but I'm teaching my kids to believe NOTHING they read online or on youtube. NOTHING. I'm teaching them to get information from first hand sources, not even "reliable" sources like newspapers because they have their own agendas too. There's a hierarchy of believability, and the higher you go, the less you put your faith into that information.
It's a sad way to grow up but when almost everything is faked for engagement, it's a reality that you can't trust anything.
dimal
I agree, but I think news was always unreliable, but the difference was that there were only a few news networks and newspapers, and they all basically said the same thing. Everyone believed the same lies, so the system worked. But thanks to the internet, we gave people the ability to create highly individualized bullshit at scale.
xpe
> No one cares about facts anymore.
There is no need to exaggerate. But I'm not only calling out a poor choice of words...
A lot of people (not as many as we would hope, I grant) care about the truth about facts. Even in this group, however, we have a problem: by the time these people are "looking for facts" their brains have already been shaped in various ways that bias how they look for facts, as explained in articles about motivated reasoning.
iambateman
You seem to care about the truth and I do. That makes two…
I’m optimistic that we can find new ways to ground our media in truthfulness over the next few decades. Some people care about that a lot.
theoreticalmal
How do you intend on handling situations where the first hand information is too complex or too technical or in a not-understood language? Such that your kids can’t directly interact with the primary source?
I completely agree with how disappointing it is that we can’t trust anything in reality anymore
01HNNWZ0MV43FF
It's not even the complexity of articles, it's the fact that they're usually fluff and clickbait with pop-ups and auto-playing videos and nag dialogs everywhere. People read headlines on aggregator sites because the aggregator sites actually want to be read by readers
Professor Legasov would be disappointed
g42gregory
I believe it is very important to do fact-checking yourself. For me, this means reading original documents, court reports, etc… Certainly not checking the current NYT/WSJ/FT takes, as they themselves have to be fact-checked.
submeta
NYT/WSJ/FT are more propagandistic then we are aware of. Just observe the developments in the Middle East, watch the language used, the euphemisms, compare that to their language when it comes to Russian aggression. It is very clear that our western media is manufacturing more consent then writing in an objective neutral language.
pstuart
True, but confirmation bias is a bitch. Without the willingness to change one's mind when presented with compelling evidence, such fact-checking borders on harmful.
cantalopes
This article has been written by an edgelord that is trying to sound very eloquent and smug
throwaway81523
You have to read past 40% of the article (1167 words of fluff) to get to what happened. Thanks for the narrative but better to just say the facts. Here's what should have been the actual lede:
> Since its debut, Glass’s brand of journalistic storytelling has resulted in countless superb installments of This American Life. It has also resulted in one devastating misfire. The nadir of the TAL approach is its January 6, 2012, episode, “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory.” When it first aired, this show appeared to be yet another example of Glass’s artistry. A reworking of The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, a stage production by the monologist Mike Daisey that had been selling out theaters around the country, the program investigates how Americans, in their zeal for iPhones and iPads, have ignored the inconvenient truth that these sleek implements are largely manufactured by workers toiling in brutal conditions at the massive Foxconn complex in Shenzhen, China.
Tldr: a bunch of the allegations in the episode were false and got past TAL's production approach at the time, but they are more careful now.
cle
Every time I read about fact-checking in journalism, I feel like there's a huge gap that nobody really talks about.
It's very easy to present a story that is 100% factually accurate, but that implies causal links or other claims that are not. Our brains love hasty generalizations, and media outlets rely on that to present near-100% truthful facts to their viewers, such that they jump to completely opposite generalizations. We're further primed for this with thought-terminating cliches like "trust the data" and "look at the facts". Media profits enormously from the subsequent outrage.
The more folks talk about "fact checking" without acknowledging the danger of cherry-picking and Texas sharpshooters and confounding variables, like in this article, the less I trust "fact checking" as a useful mechanism for forming opinions from their reported facts. Fact-checking is definitely a requirement, but still insufficient.
This is also exacerbated by narratives like those presented by TAL that introduce enormous complexity to the task, due to the emotional context.
YZF
You can have 100% fact based propaganda by cherry picking. This is not dissimilar to coming with a theory just based on your selected subset of preferred observations. This is the fuel of conspiracy theories.
I completely agree with you. Necessary but insufficient. One needs to approach your view of reality like the scientific process, looking to disprove your theories, not looking for facts that reinforce them.
Funny because I regard his show as “story time” and not something I would treat as journalism.
In contrast Tucker Carlson’s former show on Fox was a part of their “opinion” lineup and I don’t think regular viewers knew not to trust it as journalism.
When Carlson and Fox won the defamation lawsuit in 2020 it was because “Mr. Carlson’s statements were not statements of fact and that she failed adequately to allege actual malice.”
The “not statements of fact” included the reassurances that Carlson always made, in this case he said “Remember the facts of the case. These are undisputed” followed by clearly disputed and false claims.
The lawyers argued successfully that it should be clear to the viewer that what Carlson says “cannot reasonably be interpreted as fact” even when he says that these are the facts.
Arguably the bigger factor was proving malice, and Carlson seems very careful not to put anything into an email or text that undermines what he says on air.
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-yor...