Are bloggers careless with facts?

Tuesday, 25th August 2009

Matthew Yglesias says we're no worse than anyone else:

Apparently on his show earlier today, Chris Matthews was talking about the future of journalism and worried that “the bloggers don’t fact-check.” I find myself consistently surprised by how frequently this concern is voiced. The fact of the matter is that outside of peer reviewed publications by university presses, books aren’t fact-checked. Live or quasi-live television broadcasts of the sort Matthews hosts or that cable networks show all day aren’t fact-checked. Heck, newspapers aren’t fact-checked. Fact-checking is a fairly idiosyncratic element of the magazine publishing industry. What’s more, if you actually read magazines it’s clear that even a super-rigorous fact-checking process like what they do at The New Yorker doesn’t actually prevent significant errors of interpretation, omission, etc.

Obviously, it depends what you mean by "fact-checked". Newspaper articles and books are edited, after all, and live broadcasts usually have a delay button to keep the libel lawyers at bay. On the whole, I'd say that bloggers are as responsible as their mainstream peers. (Who would you rather trust, Yglesias or Chris Matthews? No contest.) But the fact that most of us don't have anyone reading over our shoulder is a drawback as well as an advantage. We might as well accept that truth.