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Posting from Felice Pace:
Have you noticed that Americans are always declaring something in their back yard the biggest, longest, cleanest, dirtiest and my personal favorite, most pristine?
One community in rural Northern California decided a
while back to erect the nation's tallest
flagpole as
an economic development project. Grants were obtained and
the pole went up. For a while it WAS apparently the tallest
flagpole in the US. But the distinction lasted less than a
year. At least this community was willing to acknowledge
that it had indeed lost the short-lived distinction.
From whence does this tendency come? Is it just Americans who do this sort of thing or is locally biased exaggeration a tendency in all human societies?
We should be able to rely on journalists to fact check claims of this type when they encounter them in the course of researching stories. And we should be able to rely on editors to require fact checking and to catch most misstatements of fact.
Unfortunately, fact checking seems to be out of favor these days necessitating the sort of correction in the comment above. This is curious in light of the web which makes fact checking so much easier than in the old days.
But even the web can be confusing. I just did a web
search - US longest free flowing river - and was not
quickly able to get the answer. I had similar problems on
Answers.com. I did however learn the name of Missouri's
longest free-flowing
river - the Meramec - as well
as Alabama's longest - the Cahaba.
I suspect that the proliferation of factual errors in modern journalism is the result of changing values. Most journalists and their editors appear to be more concerned about whether the article reads well than about whether it is factually accurate. In this they may simply be reflecting the values of readers.
I invite readers of this Blog to comment: Are factual
errors proliferating or is it just that there is more
journalism
being done? Are major publications more
or less likely to contain factual errors? What, if
anything, should be done about the situation?
And what about my pet gripe? Is this a uniquely American tendency or is it universal? Is it more prevalent in the American West than in other parts of the US?
While you are at it, please share your favorite example too.
Reply from Ed Quillen:
I see two issues here: 1) Local boosterism, and 2) lack-of-fact checking in published articles. The two are often conjoined.
For instance, there's the saga of Alfred (or Alferd)
Packer, the Colorado Cannibal. His tale has become
something of a tourist attraction in places like Lake City
(where he allegedly murdered and ate his companion
prospectors in the winter of 1873-74), Gunnison (where one
of his trials took place), and Cañon City (where he
served a prison sentence). Often, the local propaganda
proclaims that Packer was the only man in American
history ever convicted of cannibalism.
Packer was convicted of murder; that verdict was reversed on a technicality, and at his second trial, he was convicted of manslaughter.
He was never convicted of cannibalism, and a
fact-checking call to any Colorado lawyer would confirm
that. Why? Cannibalism has never been a crime in Colorado.
If it's not on the books, you can't be convicted of it. The
closest applicable crime, a misdemeanor, is something like
treating a corpse in a disrespectful manner.
Colorado legend also has it that the judge who sentenced
Packer said something like There was seven Democrats in
Hinsdale County, and you ate five of 'em, you dirty
man-eating son of a bitch. I sentences you to be hanged by
the neck until dead.
In actuality, the judge issued a
long and florid sentencing statement, talking about how
Packer had besmirched one of the most beautiful valleys on
earth.
To move on, around here the whitewater outfitters often
promote the free-flowing Arkansas River.
It is true
that there's no dam across the main stem above Pueblo
Reservoir. But every major tributary up here -- the South
Arkansas, Chalk Creek, Cottonwood Creek, Lake Creek, etc.
-- is dammed. The flow of the Arkansas is controlled,
almost to the gallon, by the Southeastern Colorado Water
Conservancy District. So it's hardly a free-flowing
river.
But should we expect a travel writer to discover
that fact, or an editor to track down all the tributary
dams?
I'd like it if they did, but it's hard to fight
mythology like Packer's. Recently we've been reading a lot
about the sad demise of the Rocky Mountain News, one of
Denver's two daily newspapers. Founded on April 23, 1859,
it was Colorado's oldest newspaper. But often I read the
myth that it was Colorado's oldest continuous
business.
It wasn't. The R&R Market in San Luis,
250 miles away, opened in 1857 and remains in business. A
minute on a search engine would have found the truth,
rather than the myth, but we live in hurried times.
And sometimes I'm leery of even dutiful fact-checking,
because it relies on books, and in my experience, books
don't get a lot of fact-checking. Back in 1984, I helped
write a book on cocaine (The White Stuff, published by Dell
in 1985). I had reams of notes and documentation in case
the editor should call, but the only question I got
concerned a line that cocaine had become more available
than a McDonald's hamburger.
The editor called, saying he thought that was a gross exaggeration. I pointed out that at the time, I could pick up the phone and have cocaine delivered to my door, whereas the nearest McDonald's was nearly 60 miles away in Cañon City. The editor, based in New York City, said he had trouble even imagining a place so remote and unpopulated as to be that far from a McDonald's. (Now there's one about half a mile down the street from my house).
But that was it for fact-checking on a non-fiction book published by a major publishing house.
Sure, I'd like to see more, but when you're dealing with
legends and mythology, as with Packer and the Rocky
Mountain News and our free-flowing
river, you're
facing a constant struggle, trying to get people to
understand that what they think they know isn't true.
Sometimes you just get tired of fighting.
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