Nina Totenberg, Jane Mayer Stories: Journalism’s Lack of Accountability

The narrator of Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, a novel set against the depravity of 1980s New York, works in the “Department of Factual Verification” at a magazine that sounds conspicuously like the New Yorker. There, a fact-checker has “the sole aim of sorting out matters of fact from matters of opinion, disregarding the latter, and tracking the alleged facts through dusty volumes, along skeins of microfilm, across transcontinental telephone cables, till they prove good or are exposed as error.” This is how many of us grew up thinking about publications like the New Yorker — well, as much as any average person would ponder such things. Whatever the magazine’s politics, surely the veracity of every contention was cycled through layers of editing, every data point triple-checked and every semicolon properly placed.

This kind of professionalism was probably something of an illusion even back then. Who knows what kind of shoddy, unethical work writers got away with in the pre-Internet era? There were little means of finding out, and little recourse if you did. I was recently researching the roots of the Roe v. Wade decision, for instance, when I came across Walter Cronkite’s 1965 program on abortion, which had greatly exaggerated the number of back-alley abortion deaths. That stat, incessantly repeated thereafter by the media, then went on to help shape public opinion for decades.

About the Author

David Harsanyi

David Harsanyi is a senior writer at the Washington Examiner.

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The narrator of Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, a novel set against the depravity of 1980s New York, works in the “Department of Factual Verification” at a magazine that sounds conspicuously like the New Yorker. There, a fact-checker has “the sole aim of sorting out matters of fact from matters of opinion, disregarding the latter, and tracking the alleged facts through dusty volumes, along skeins of microfilm, across transcontinental telephone cables, till they prove good or are exposed as error.” This is how many of us grew up thinking about publications like the New Yorker — well, as much as any average person would ponder such things. Whatever the magazine’s politics, surely the veracity of every contention was cycled through layers of editing, every data point triple-checked and every semicolon properly placed.

This kind of professionalism was probably something of an illusion even back then. Who knows what kind of shoddy, unethical work writers got away with in the pre-Internet era? There were little means of finding out, and little recourse if you did. I was recently researching the roots of the Roe v. Wade decision, for instance, when I came across Walter Cronkite’s 1965 program on abortion, which had greatly exaggerated the number of back-alley abortion deaths. That stat, incessantly repeated thereafter by the media, then went on to help shape public opinion for decades.