Palko points to this interesting article by Emma Copley Eisenberg on fact checking.
Academic books and articles don’t get fact checked—in my experience, they don’t get edited at all, except for mostly-useless copy editing—but once I wrote an article for the (online) New Yorker and it got fact checked, which was kinda fun. The New Yorker still publishes occasional factual errors, but I guess it’s good that they try to avoid doing so.
P.S. Regarding Gladwell, the problem is ultimately not with him as much as the news media (NPR, etc.) that take him seriously. Similarly with people like Newt Gingrich: there’s nothing stopping a retired politician from mouthing off, also there’s nothing forcing the news media to treat him with respect.
I’m not sure how well fact-checking would work for a substantial number of academic disciplines. A history based on deep archival work would be essentially impossible to fact-check without essentially redoing all the research something not really possible in a reasonable amount of time.
Writing is a dangerous game; lots of “facts,” turn out not to be facts but are merely accepted because we believe them to be true. So, rather than another disquisition on the color of the line which separates oncoming traffic in the U.S. (and Canada), note that Andrew specifically mentions Emma Copley Eisenberg regarding fact checking. If you go to the link,
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/fact-checking-is-the-core-of-nonfiction-writing-why-do-so-many-publishers-refuse-to-do-it
you find this statement which undermines her contention about copy editing:
“My wonderful editor at Hachette understood from the beginning that it was my intention to get the book fact checked, but confirmed to me that I would have to pay for the checker myself; a legal read to protect Hachette and I from potential lawsuits would, however, be covered.”
Real quick: what grammatical mistake did she make that any elderly copy editor, well versed in sentence diagramming, would immediately unearth?
Hachette and me
I would argue for dropping the comma before ‘but’ since it’s not a compound sentence and the comma confuses the reading. Less critical is changing the last ‘I’ to ‘me’, but that rule is relaxing and the meaning is perfectly clear either way. Especially strict editors would object to the placement of ‘however’, but that has, however, become a common style. I found the use of the semicolon to be aesthetically pleasing.
I loved diagramming sentences — it was more fun than reading books! But I knew I was weird even then.
John N-G is far too kind when he notes, “Less critical is changing the last ‘I’ to ‘me’, but that rule is relaxing and the meaning is perfectly clear either way.” I spent a great deal of my youth learning how to diagram sentences and how to distinguish the nominative from the objective case in English. I was duly rewarded as I ascended the academic ladder. To remove the distinction as followers of Andrew’s Columbia University colleague, John McWhorter, would suggest, is to diminish all my hard work and scholarship. Besides, it is dead wrong and an indication of a social climber.
The next things on the chopping block may well be the distinctions between “amount” and “number,” “continuous” and “continual,” “literally” and “figuratively.” Long gone is the rule for replacing “as……as…..” with “so…..as….” when there is a negative comparison. I fully expect that in the very near future, the word, “like,” will be mandatory in every sentence.
Amin
In theory academic books are supposed to be fact-checked in the peer review, but that often breaks down when they draw on data outside a specific community. In one case that I know, nobody caught that an author was using studies of human remains published during WW II, but not the following 70 years of studies by the same and other authors which had different conclusions. Anthropometry was just not the reviewers’ specialty so they did not know there was later research.
And academic publishing is vulnerable to frauds, whether that is made-up data in a study of a COVID treatment, or citing an nonexistent archival document or journal articles (before the Internet became mainstream, scammers often made up citations from the USSR and obscure professional associations).
Fact checking is not he purview of peer review. And your example is not about fact checking, because it is not about verifying factual information.
It is absolutely the purview of both peer review and fact checking to say “Pedantius, Liber Librorum 1.2.3 does not say what you say it says” or “you cite the preliminary report but that detail was retracted in the final report on that site.”
To check an author’s use of references isn’t fact checking.
And it also seems to me that if B is a premise in a key argument in a text, a fact checker or peer reviewer should not just verify that *someone* says B, but whether B is disputed and if so that the text acknowledges the dispute. That is certainly the responsibility of post-publication reviewers: a key function of academic book reviews is to point to research or evidence which the author left out.
To check an author’s use of references isn’t fact checking. And good luck getting peer reviewers to ” not just verify that *someone* says B, but whether B is disputed and if so that the text acknowledges the dispute.”
And whatever you think the “responsibility of post-publication reviewers” is, it is not the responsibility of peer reviewers.
Real quick: what grammatical mistake did she make”
Methinks she should have said “Hachette and me” instead of “Hachette and I”
From the article linked, it sounds like you can get a good fact-checker for your book for around $10,000. Which I’m sure a star like Gladwell could afford.
Isn’t fact checking a specifically US cultural phenomenon?
As someone born in the 1970s, I don’t recall it as part of the UK or Australian tradition of journalism.
I think it’s healthier to grow up believing that every word you read in the paper has been written by a beer-sodden hack and rewritten by an editor with a barrow to push, and all of it should be trusted about as far as you can spit.
I think it’s healthy to have skepticism of a work regardless of whether it’s been fact-checked, but I haven’t seen any evidence of widespread skepticism on either side of the Atlantic (or Pacific).