Tuesday, January 31, 2006

Did not, did too

This may reignite the conversation earlier this year about fact-checking. It may also ignite a conversation about how magazines deal with letters of complaint and/or clarification from readers.

It is an extraordinary exchange of e-mail messages between an aggrieved author and source and the New Yorker about an article it published on the life of the author of Mary Poppins. It was published recently on the website of the Columbia Journalism Review.

There wouldn't be many Canadian magazines that would undertake such a lengthy correspondence. Because of the serial nature of the e-mails back and forth, one gets a very interesting picture of the way in which the New Yorker manipulated the situation to protect its writer; of course, it could be because they were right and the letter writer was wrong. But what if it was the other way around?

1 Comments:

Blogger Tanya Gulliver, PWAC President said...

It is very interesting, and perhaps a nice debate for an ethics class in a journalism school. When do "facts" become part of the public domain? If a writer researches information from a source (and that source received their information from another source, and so on) what is the obligation of the writer to trace that back to the beginning?
Tanya

2:24 pm  

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