Craig Silverman

Journalists and news organizations need to do a better job of avoiding involvement in the spread of lies and unconfirmed rumors.

Accuracy and credibility are the heart of good journalism, and Craig Silverman‘s study Lies, Damned Lies and Viral Content documents widespread disregard for both in the spreading of digital reports by pro.

I won’t attempt to summarize the report here, though I will use some favorite quotes from it at the end of this post. I hope you will read the full report (it’s 164 pages) and consider what it says about you and your news organization.

What I want to focus on here are some suggestions for news organizations and individual journalists, some of which repeat Craig’s own suggestions and some of which are my suggestions, inspired by his report:

Confirming and debunking rumors

To start, I don’t think chasing rumors is necessarily the highest form of journalism, though admittedly, great journalistic investigation starts with a tip that’s indistinguishable from a rumor. But in general, I would encourage a journalistic approach that seeks to find and publish new information rather than chasing rumors.

That said, some rumors are newsworthy and can’t be ignored, and some news organizations have at least part of their operation devoted to aggregation and curation of material published first elsewhere.

Newsrooms should discuss and set standards for whether and how they debunk rumors. Early in my career, many an editor dismissed the suggestion that we should ever publicly address rumors we couldn’t confirm. I remember more than one editor snarling something to the effect that “we don’t publish rumors, we publish facts.”

Of course, we often researched rumors and published them if we confirmed them as facts. That’s still a good approach. But we generally didn’t debunk the rumors we found out were false. Perhaps that was the right approach back when rumors circulated by word of mouth. But, with rumors being published today in social media, and sometimes amplified by other media sources, I think we should attempt to shoot down the false rumors we bother to check out.

I don’t offer my suggestions as a finished set of standards for you to follow, but as a discussion-starter. The discussion might lead to some better standards that I would gladly adopt in place of mine. But here are my suggestions for an approach newsrooms and individual journalists should take to verifying or disproving rumors:

• Don’t publish rumors until you have checked them out (with one exception I’ll note in detail in the crowdsourcing section below).
• Don’t check out a rumor unless you would consider it newsworthy if it turns out to be true. In other words, I don’t think news organizations need to chase every rumor that makes it into social media or the competition. But if it’s newsworthy, you should check it out before publishing.
• If a rumor would be newsworthy if it’s true, and you check it out, it’s probably worth debunking, especially if it’s circulated widely in social media or has been published in other professional media.
• One exception to the point above: If a rumor would be harmful to someone’s reputation and hasn’t circulated widely or been published in other professional media, you should consider whether debunking the rumor would actually give it some level of credibility, and more circulation, and be more harmful to the person’s reputation. As Craig says in the report: “Repeating the rumor bomb detonates it—regardless of context.” You might ask the person how much they’ve been damaged by the rumor and whether they would prefer for you to disprove it or let it die quietly without further attention.
• Especially for a local news organization, I don’t think you need to feel responsible for correcting every error that makes it into social media or even all the errors that competing media make. But an occasional story such as the Washington Post’s What was fake on the Internet this week is both fun content and helps set the record straight (and shows a commitment to accuracy).
• You should be clear and specific about who erred (when you know) and about how you verified or debunked a rumor. Do it in a factual, non-accusatory way. You’ll make your share of errors, too, and did-not-did-too pissing matches don’t serve anyone well.

Crowdsourcing rumor verification (and debunking)

Your community can help you get to the bottom of a story. Andy Carvin of Reported.ly (and formerly of NPR) is exceptionally good at this. I’ve used his example of quickly shooting down a rumor that Israelis were arming Libyan rebels as an excellent example of crowdsourcing, and his debunking of the Gay Girl in Damascus blogger’s fake disappearance was another. But he used a technique I would use sparingly, and with great care: He says what the rumor is before he’s learned whether it’s true.

They ID it as Israeli. Maybe, maybe not. Need help to ID it. Anyone? RT @jan15egy: it’s posted on Al Manara Press FB http://goo.gl/LMfeU

— Andy Carvin (@acarvin) March 12, 2011

Andy Carvin used this photo of a shell found during the Libyan uprising to crowdsource a question about the symbols on the shell.

That link only leads now to the Al Manara Press Facebook page and the image is not there any more. But I’ve posted it here and it plausibly looked like Israel’s Star of David on the side of the shell, along with a crescent, appearing to symbolize some sort of alliance between the Israelis and a Muslim group. In posting the rumor (or speculation), Andy raised a question about it and asked his Twitter followers for help in determining the truth of the rumor. In doing so, he risked that others might spread the rumor without spreading his questions about it. But he also quickly got to the bottom of the rumor: That star has marked illumination shells since World War I, before the creation of modern-day Israel. And the crescent is a parachute. The illumination shell drops slowly into an enemy area at night, glowing brightly to help artillery units determine where to aim the live shells. Many nations manufacture illumination shells using those symbols.

I have used crowdsourcing some myself and worked with newsrooms that have crowdsourced successfully. I think it’s a technique that helps in verification of rumors, but should be used carefully. Some tips for crowdsourcing as you seek to verify or disprove rumors:

• Don’t crowdsource verification of a rumor that could harm someone’s reputation. I did a fair amount of reporting on sexual assault in my career, and you simply can’t crowdsource a story like that by tweeting that you’re looking for people who have been abused by a particular coach, clergy member or politician whom you’re investigating. On the other hand, verifying some information is a great way to do some crowdsourcing. Once I nailed down a story about abuse by a particular priest, publication of that story would often bring forward tips or direct contact with more victims of that priest or other priests. And that was without any crowdsourcing requests. If you have a verified story, consider whether a crowdsourcing request for others who have experienced this offense to come forward so you can advance the story.
• Consider whether you can word a crowdsourcing request generally, rather than repeating a rumor. For instance, if you’ve heard a police-scanner report of shots fired at a local high school (and police-scanner reports should be treated like rumors; police and fire departments chase more false alarms than they do big news stories), you don’t have to tweet: “Can anyone confirm that shots were fired at Yourtown High School?” That could unnecessarily panic parents if it’s a false alarm. Of course, you’re going to dispatch reporters and photographers immediately to the school, but you also can tweet, while they’re en route, “Does anyone know what’s happening at Yourtown High School?” That might get you quick confirmation that something serious is happening. Or it could get you a quick response that someone was overreacting to a car that backfired.
• Address people who are discussing a rumor in social media, asking them how they know what they’re saying and letting them know that you’re trying to nail down the fact. In my case study of how the Austin American Statesman covered a 2010 breaking story, I noted how carefully Robert Quigley, then the social media editor, responded to people tweeting about rumors:

@chicklitter We’re trying to get to the bottom of it. No official explanation out there yet. We are working on it.

— Austin Statesman (@statesman) February 18, 2010

• Collaborate on how to crowdsource. Confer with your editor (or your staff) in whether and how to crowdsource confirmation of a rumor. Even if everyone seems to agree, encourage someone to make the opposing arguments, so you can consider all options.
• Don’t just turn your verification over to the crowd. You start with them, but they might be wrong, so be diligent in asking questions and assessing their answers. Ask how someone knows what they’re telling you. If they’re giving you secondhand information, ask if they can connect you with the firsthand source. If they witnessed something, ask if they took photos or videos. Ask for details and documentation. Ask who else witnessed something or who else knows something about this.
• Thank (and credit) people who provide helpful, accurate information.

When sharing links or retweeting

You don’t have time to be active in social media and thoroughly check everything before you share it, but you want to be a credible source in social media.

• If it sounds too good to be true, that should be a tip-off that it might be. The more incredible a story sounds, the more you should consider what “incredible” really means: not credible. Look those stories over carefully before you share them.
• Consider the nature of an article before you share it. If it’s a humor piece or a commentary on a situation that’s been in the news, and the underlying facts have been widely reported, you probably don’t need to worry much about posting it. But if the heart of the piece is a fact or a piece of news you haven’t heard before, you should at least consider the source and examine the verification the source presents.
• Consider how serious a mistake it would be if you retweeted or shared something that turned out to be bogus. For instance, last week’s llama-chase story would have been pretty harmless if it turned out to be bogus, so I’m not going to fault someone who shared that story without checking it out. If, on the other hand, a story might damage someone’s reputation or cause a panic, that requires extensive checking out. Many stories fall somewhere in between.
• Evaluate the source. Lots of those llama-chase links were live video feeds of bona fide media organizations covering the story. It was pretty easy to see quickly that this was really happening.
• Check to see if someone has already debunked or verified the rumor. Particularly is a rumor would be of national interest, Snopes.com, Hoax-Slayer and Doubtful News (sources Craig cited as diligent in disproving rumors) might already have addressed a rumor. Or if you’re dealing with a political statement, PolitiFact, Factcheck.org or Fact Checker might already have assessed it. If the person, organization or issue has a Wikipedia page, see whether the rumor is addressed there. Wikipedia entries can be wrong, and Wikipedia cautions against using it as a primary source, but it requires citations, and you can check the links in the citations to find helpful primary sources.
• If a reputable media source has done original reporting, I’m fine with sharing its report. I didn’t verify that Edward Snowden had revealed National Security Agency snooping to the Guardian. I couldn’t duplicate the Guardian’s reporting, and I trusted it. But if a story from a trusted media source is later corrected, you should share the correction, too. For instance, I don’t fault anyone who last week shared Jezebel’s report about Scott Walker proposing to delete language from Wisconsin state law requiring reporting of sexual assaults on campuses. Jezebel does solid reporting on gender issues and should be a reliable source on a story such as this. I didn’t share the link, but I might have “liked” someone else’s post about it. But if you shared the story, you should also note that it was updated to note that the University of Wisconsin asked for deletion of the state requirement, which was redundant with its federal reporting requirement. On the other hand, asking skeptical questions when you read media reports is a good idea, and I’d applaud anyone who read the original report and wondered whether the university would still have to meet the federal requirement.
• Many popular media organizations, whether they do original reporting or not, also follow up on stories reported elsewhere, either adding their own reporting or often just aggregating the original report. As Craig’s report documents, many professional media organizations have passed along bogus reports in this way. Try to get to the original source of a story you share, so you can make a better assessment of it (and link to the source that deserves the credit, if it’s true).
• Watch out for news sources that deliberately publish hoax stories. Of course, some people fall for the satire in The Onion or the New Yorker’s Borowitz Report, and I guess you can’t do anything about that, except maybe share such a link with a humorous comment and hope people can figure it out. The Daily Currant isn’t as funny, but describes itself as satirical (and I’ve laughed at some of its pieces, though it’s not as funny as Borowitz or The Onion). Craig counts the Currant in a group of fake news sites that just seek to fool people (and generate traffic) by churning out fake news. Others he lists are National Report, Civic Tribune, World News Daily Report and WIT Science. (I didn’t find satire disclaimers on any of those sites. In fact, they generally had official-looking about-us pages designed to make them look like legitimate sources of news and information.) You should not share information from these organizations. And generally, if you’re not familiar with a news site, you should be doubly careful about sharing anything from it.
• Check a person’s social profile. If a friend or social contact you know and trust shares something (especially if it’s a personal statement, not just passing along a link you can examine to assess that source’s credibility), you have a basis for trusting what that person says. But if you see something reported by a source you don’t know, take a look at that person’s profile and assess what you can. For instance, I follow @badbanana because he’s funny, but a quick look at his tweets would tell you not to take anything he tweets seriously. He’s always joking, but you might not see that from an individual tweet. If a profile is fairly new, that might be a tip-off that it’s a fake. If the person offers a link to a website, blog or LinkedIn profile, that might give you more basis for assessing credibility.
• Share with some skepticism. If you can’t verify a report (or don’t have time, but think it’s important to share), post it with a disclaimer, such as “if this is true …” or ask your social circle: “I haven’t heard this before. Anyone know if it’s true?”

Correct quickly and thoroughly

When you learn that you have circulated a bogus report, I think you have a responsibility to correct it and to do what you can to stop its spread. Here’s what I recommend:

• Delete the original post if it’s a tweet. I generally don’t recommend deleting tweets, but you can’t edit a tweet, and an inaccurate tweet stands out there on its own, subject to being read and retweeted, so I would delete a tweet that’s egregiously in error.
• If it’s a Facebook post, you can edit to correct it, so I would decide which approach is better in the circumstance: editing or deleting.
• Acknowledge your error. If you delete a tweet or Facebook post, I think you should tweet or post that you deleted the earlier post and that it was inaccurate and why. You might post a link to the accurate information, particularly if it’s something like a Snopes report that debunks what you originally posted.
• I think you should go one step further, even if it’s a big step: Call your correction to the attention of those who have retweeted or shared your original post. Both Twitter and Facebook show who shared or retweeted your posts (be sure to check before you delete the post). You can post your correction to a person’s Facebook wall (with thanks to them for sharing and an apology for your error) or you can tweet at a person. Frankly, I think you should call out your correction to people who’ve liked it or favorited the tweet, too, but you should especially correct those who have passed your error along. When I’ve suggested this before, some people have said that’s too much work in cases where something has been shared dozens or even hundreds or thousands of times. I disagree. Credibility is essential, and correcting one error hundreds of times will make you more cautious next time you want to share something without checking it out. Cutting and pasting will speed the process. I also wish Facebook and Twitter would develop a correction function where you could, with one correction, notify the people who’ve interacted with an inaccurate post.

What are your tips?

I’d be happy to share other tips for verifying rumors, sharing media reports responsibly on social media. What are some steps you take to assess credibility when sharing? What are some lessons you’ve learned the hard way?

Quotes from ‘Lies, Damn Lies and Viral Content’

As I said above, I’m not going to summarize Craig’s report. I hope you read it in full. It’s worth the time for any journalist, journalism student or journalism professor (or a serious news consumer). But here are some quotes from the report that stood out to me:

Lies spread much farther than the truth, and news organizations play a powerful role in making this happen. News websites dedicate far more time and resources to propagating questionable and often false claims than they do working to verify and/or debunk viral content and online rumors. Rather than acting as a source of accurate information, online media frequently promote misinformation in an attempt to drive traffic and social engagement. …

Many news sites apply little or no basic verification to the claims they pass on. Instead, they rely on linking-out to other media reports, which themselves often only cite other media reports as well. The story’s point of origin, once traced back through the chain of links, is often something posted on social media or a thinly sourced claim from a person or entity. …

News organizations are inconsistent at best at following up on the rumors and claims they offer initial coverage. This is likely connected to the fact that they pass them on without adding reporting or value. With such little effort put into the initial rewrite of a rumor, there is little thought or incentive to follow up. The potential for traffic is also greatest when a claim or rumor is new. So journalists jump fast, and frequently, to capture traffic. Then they move on. …

The data collected using the Emergent database revealed that many news organizations pair an article about a rumor or unverified claim with a headline that declares it to be true. This is a fundamentally dishonest practice. …

Once a certain critical mass is met, repetition has a powerful effect on belief. The rumor becomes true for readers simply by virtue of its ubiquity.

Meanwhile, news organizations that maintain higher standards for the content they aggregate and publish remain silent and restrained. They don’t jump on viral content and emerging news—but, generally, nor do they make a concerted effort to debunk or correct falsehoods or questionable claims. This leads to perhaps my most important conclusion and recommendation: News organizations should move to occupy the middle ground between mindless propagation and wordless restraint.

If it’s newsworthy, such as the report of flooding at the NYSE, at least a few journalists are likely to jump on it prior to practicing verification. If one (or more) credible outlet moves the information, others are quick to pile on, setting off a classic information cascade. When a rumor or claim starts generating traffic and gets picked up by other media outlets, then it’s even more likely journalists will decide to write something. The danger, aside from journalists becoming cogs in the misinformation wheel, is that it’s incredibly difficult to make corrections go just as viral.

Present someone with information that contradicts what they know and believe, and they will most likely double down on existing beliefs. It’s called the backfire effect and it’s one of several human cognitive factors that make debunking misinformation difficult. The truth is that facts alone are not enough to combat misinformation. …

News organizations must recognize the value of being smart filters in a world of abundant, dubious, and questionable information. …

Journalism’s fundamental value proposition is that it provides information to help people live their lives and understand the world around them. This is impossible to do when we are actively promoting and propagating false information. It’s impossible when we do a poor job of communicating the uncertainty and complexity of claims that circulate on networks and elsewhere. …

The very act of pointing to a rumor or claim adds a level of credibility. …

One of the easiest ways to avoid becoming part of a chain of dubious propagation is to take a few minutes and search/read closely to see where the claim or rumor originated. Don’t point to a rumor unless you have located the original source and evidence and evaluated it. …

I also advocate developing standard language that can be used in content. For example: ‘This claim has not been independently verified by [news org] and therefore should be treated with skepticism. We published it because [insert reason].’ If you don’t feel comfortable explaining why it needs to be reported at any given moment, that’s a sign you shouldn’t publish. …

Provide a counter narrative: This is one of the most important debunking strategies. The goal is to replace the existing narrative in a person’s mind with new facts. It’s more effective than a piecemeal approach to refuting rumors. Humans are attracted to stories, not a recitation of information. … Journalists should use all the storytelling tools available to make a debunking compelling and persuasive. Don’t be a spoilsport denier—tell a great story.

Related links

American Journalism Review’s Rumors, Lies and the Internet: 7 Questions for Craig Silverman

MediaShift’s How Lies Spread Faster Than Truth: A Study Of Viral Content

Nieman Lab’s A new Tow Center report looks at how news outlets help spread (or debunk) false rumors

Poynter’s Report: Online media are more a part of the problem of misinformation ‘than they are the solution’

Verification Handbook (edited by Craig Silverman, with a contribution from me)

My earlier posts on verification:

How to verify information from tweets: Check it out

Advice for editors: Stand for accuracy and accountability

Resources to help journalists with accuracy and verification

Tips on verifying facts and ensuring accuracy

Investigative reporting is about discovery of a story, not confirmation of your notions.

That is the key mistake Rolling Stone made in its false, and now retracted, story “A Rape on Campus,” as I read the Columbia School of Journalism report on the fiasco.

“Rolling Stone’s repudiation of the main narrative in ‘A Rape on Campus’ is a story of journalistic failure that was avoidable. The failure encompassed reporting, editing, editorial supervision and fact-checking,” wrote the Columbia authors, Sheila Coronel, J-School Dean Steve Coll and Derek Kravitz.

The failure started, though, with a preconceived notion of what the story should be. Reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely; Sean Woods, the primary editor of the story; and Will Dana, managing editor; had too strong a vision of what the story should be and not a strong enough commitment to learn what it really was.

I worked on a series on rape in 1993 for the Omaha World-Herald. We started out pursuing a notion about rape, focusing on rape by strangers, prompted by a series of rapes in an Omaha neighborhood.

We did report on that series of rapes and about stranger rape, but our series focused more heavily on two surprising factors that we found in our wider study of the issues: the startlingly low number of rapes that actually result in rape convictions and the startlingly high percentage of rape victims who were younger than 18.

The series we produced ended up being significantly different from the series we planned. That should be the case in most investigative stories: You make a plan to investigate a topic, not to support a premise. A good story investigated well takes you directions you didn’t anticipate.

If Rolling Stone had been trying to discover the story, the reporter and the editors would have insisted on talking to the friends of their primary source, whom they identified as “Jackie.” They would have insisted on talking to her date on the night in question, and to other men and women who attended the supposed “date night” at Phi Kappa Psi, the University of Virginia fraternity smeared by Rolling Stone‘s story.

Unlike Rolling Stone, we didn’t focus in our 1993 series on a single “emblematic” rape situation to tell in detail. We told stories of multiple rape survivors. Some profiles told more about circumstances of the rape. Others focused on the trauma the person experienced or the treatment she received. They told the story together, rather than burdening a single story with representing everything that we found in our investigation.

It is difficult to prove details of a rape, because accounts of what happened invariably conflict and witnesses to the actual crime are rare, unless they were participants, as Jackie alleged in the Rolling Stone story.

However, you can find confirmation (or conflict) in the circumstances surrounding a rape. In my various stories about rape, I have confirmed details about circumstances by obtaining police and medical reports and by interviewing friends, family members and attorneys of suspects and accusers.

Erdely did seek details, the Columbia report said:

In the end, the reporter relied heavily on Jackie for help in getting access to corroborating evidence and interviews. Erdely asked Jackie for introductions to friends and family. She asked for text messages to confirm parts of Jackie’s account, for records from Jackie’s employment at the aquatic center and for health records. She even asked to examine the bloodstained red dress Jackie said she had worn on the night she said she was attacked.

For all that, though, the report concluded, Rolling Stone failed to pursue multiple opportunities to confirm details of Jackie’s story (or learn of the weaknesses in the story):

There were a number of ways that Erdely might have reported further, on her own, to verify what Jackie had told her. Jackie told the writer that one of her rapists had been part of a small discussion group in her anthropology class. Erdely might have tried to verify independently that there was such a group and to identify the young man Jackie described. She might have examined Phi Kappa Psi’s social media for members she could interview and for evidence of a party on the night Jackie described. Erdely might have looked for students who worked at the aquatic center and sought out clues about the lifeguard Jackie had described. Any one of these and other similar reporting paths might have led to discoveries that would have caused Rolling Stone to reconsider its plans. But three failures of reporting effort stand out. They involve basic, even routine journalistic practice – not special investigative effort. And if these reporting pathways had been followed, Rolling Stone very likely would have avoided trouble.

Those three critical failures were:

• Erdely did not contact the friends Jackie said she talked with shortly after the assault that she described. Jackie never asked the reporter not to contact her friends independently.
• Erdely asked the fraternity for a comment late in the reporting process, but never provided details of the story for them to address.
• Erdely’s efforts to track down the alleged assailant were not diligent enough even to determine that no member of the fraternity worked at the aquatic center where Jackie was a lifeguard.

The one lifeguard at the pool who had the name Jackie used for her assailant was “not a member of Phi Kappa Psi, however,” the Columbia report said. “The police interviewed him and examined his personal records. They found no evidence to link him to Jackie’s assault. If Rolling Stone had located him and heard his response to Jackie’s allegations, including the verifiable fact that he did not belong to Phi Kappa Psi, this might have led Erdely to reconsider her focus on that case. In any event, Rolling Stone stopped looking for him.”

One of the most disappointing aspects of the report is Rolling Stone‘s response. Woods continues to point the finger at Jackie: “Ultimately, we were too deferential to our rape victim; we honored too many of her requests in our reporting,” he told the Columbia investigators.

That’s bullshit. As I’ve noted before, journalists, not sources, are responsible for the accuracy of our stories. To me, one of the most disturbing aspects of the report is that Rolling Stone doesn’t recognize that this was a systemic failure, identifying problems the magazine must address. The reporter and editors just see the story as a result of mistakes they need to avoid repeating.

The Columbia report says:

Erdely’s reporting records and interviews with participants make clear that the magazine did not pursue important reporting paths even when Jackie had made no request that they refrain. The editors made judgments about attribution, fact-checking and verification that greatly increased their risks of error but had little or nothing to do with protecting Jackie’s position.

Nothing in this Rolling Stone fiasco was the fault of Jackie. Whether she was a victim of some kind of sexual assault that she exaggerated, or was just a liar, she didn’t give the magazine enough to go on. Beyond confirming that the university had received a report of her allegation, Rolling Stone didn’t take any of the steps it could have taken to investigate her story.

You investigate a rape survivor’s story not just out of suspicion (but journalists should always be suspicious), but to bolster her story and yours. Rape accusers will be viciously attacked (I saw that happen in a case where the defendant eventually plead guilty). Even if you believe a story, you need to investigate it to confirm your belief and to strengthen the story.

Other responses to the Columbia report:

Jay Rosen‘s analysis of the report is far more detailed than mine.

So is Erik Wemple’s.

Ben Mullin of Poynter rounded up journalists’ reactions to the report.

My earlier post with advice on interviewing rape survivors and verifying their stories.

Judith Miller clearly reflected in great detail on her rise to prominence in working on her memoir, The Story: A Reporter’s Journey.

She appears to have reflected very little, though, on her failures in reporting on intelligence about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq when the Bush administration was rushing the United States into that disastrous war.

Here’s how little The Story reveals about any examination by Miller of the weaknesses of her own reporting about WMDs: In her only reference to either of the Knight-Ridder reporters who reported extensively on the intelligence community’s doubts about Iraq’s WMDs, Miller identifies Jonathan Landay incorrectly as being with “the McClatchy newspaper chain.” McClatchy would not buy Knight-Ridder until 2006, but the context of the discussion Miller was recounting was 2004.

Landay and Warren Strobel worked for Knight-Ridder when they did the journalism that Miller and her New York Times colleagues should have been doing: reporting on doubts within U.S. intelligence agencies about the claims that Iraq was making weapons of mass destruction.

Because the Times and other media were all parroting the Bush administration’s claims that Iraq had WMD’s, even some Knight-Ridder editors often didn’t run or buried the Landay-Strobel stories that countered that narrative. As Erik Wemple of the Washington Post noted in 2013, “They published dissenting material, though their voices didn’t pierce the compliant noise from their peers.”

Miller, chief among those compliant peers, mentioned Landay in the context of a conversation with Times editors Bill Keller and Jill Abramson, who were preparing an editor’s note acknowledging the weaknesses in the newspaper’s pre-war coverage of intelligence about WMD’s. The two paragraphs in The Story about Landay (on Page 220) are fascinating and telling:

Others had written better, more comprehensive stories about the dispute, Keller said. Jonathan Landay of the McClatchy newspaper chain, for instance, had written in greater detail about it in October. Why hadn’t I?

I recalled that Landay’s story was published about a month after ours. It had quoted one source by name: David Albright. At the time, no editor had mentioned it to me or Michael.

I’ll explain later* who Michael and David Albright are, but here’s what these paragraphs say about Miller and the Times:

• Miller found only one Landay story worth noting in her examination of her own WMD reporting.
• In noting that she recalled the Landay story (rather than digging it up in her research later), Miller acknowledges that she was aware at the time of his reporting. Which means she essentially blew it off at the time.
• She is dismissive of the only Landay story she acknowledges, noting that she wrote about the same topic first and that he used unnamed sources more than she did. Those would be points to boast about only if she had gotten the story right.
• If Miller is correct that no Times editors mentioned the Landay story at the time, that also is telling about the newspaper’s lack of consideration at the time about whether its reporting was right.

Update: Landay has elaborated on this story and more in a subsequent post.

If Miller were truly writing an introspective account of her career and the stories for which she became infamous, the Knight-Ridder stories might have merited a full chapter. As it is, the only mention of Knight-Ridder (other than the McClatchy mention that should have been Knight-Ridder) is a passing mention on Page 247 about a story that questioned the credibility of one of her sources, Adnan Saeed Haideri al-Haideri, an Iraqi chemical engineer. Knight-Ridder and Strobel didn’t even rate entries in the book’s index.

If everyone in the media had screwed up in coverage of intelligence about weapons of mass destruction, The Story might fly. It tells how she gained her expertise in germ warfare and Middle Eastern affairs. The book details how deftly she managed Times politics and how hard she worked to report her many erroneous stories about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. You understand well how she became such an important reporter. You don’t doubt that she earned her Pulitzer Prize, her place on the Times best-seller list and all the front-page stories she boasts about. She provides an insightful (and at times shameful) glimpse into how turf-conscious journalists (especially Times journalists) can be.

Miller also makes valid points that she was not a solo operator at the Times. She shared bylines on many of her WMD stories and editors not only published her stories, but closely watched the competition, and none of those colleagues started matching or pushing for the Times to match the Knight-Ridder stories.

But Miller was proud to lead the Times coverage leading up to the war. And The Story is her story. Like her career, the book turns on her WMD reporting. Miller painstakingly debunks notions about her reporting, quantifying how little she relied on Ahmad Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress, an exile group that favored U.S. intervention in Iraq, and denying that she was “spoon-fed” her stories by the Bush administration and repeating ad nauseam the expertise of the sources she used (not high-level administration sources, she notes repeatedly, but in-the-trenches experts on intelligence, germ warfare and Iraq).

But the undeniable fact is that someone else was reporting the truth that U.S. intelligence had grave doubts about whether Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. And the best Judith Miller and the Times could do were hedges in their stories about the certainty that Iraq was making and stockpiling WMDs.

As Wemple said in a post skewering Miller’s book:

And again, Miller looks back at all that glorious qualifying language. ‘I was okay with it. The story contained numerous caveats.’

Note to Miller: People don’t read the caveats.

All the detail about how hard she worked on her flawed stories might matter if she had bothered to explain why she got the underlying story wrong when others were getting it right. How did she react to their stories? Was the mighty Times too dismissive of Knight-Ridder? Did she hear of the doubts from some sources but dismiss them because of assurances from sources she trusted more? Was her circle of sources so narrow that she never heard the doubts? Did Landay and Strobel have a key source, or sources in a key area of the intelligence network, that she couldn’t crack? We never find out.

Miller barely mentions the journalists who got the story right. She just falls back again on her excuse I have ripped repeatedly in this blog and an earlier blog. On Page 291, describing a story by Don Van Natta Jr. and other Times reporters about the paper’s failures in covering WMD intelligence, Miller wrote:

As I acknowledged in Van Natta’s piece, I had gotten WMD ‘totally wrong.’ ‘If your sources were wrong,’ I told them, ‘you are wrong.’ I had done the best I could to verify the classified information I had often gotten first, the story had quoted me as saying. But I was ‘wrong.’

As I have said again and again, journalists, not sources, are responsible for the accuracy of our work. Other journalists got this story right, and it was shameful for her to write about it more than a decade later without a shade of introspection, still blaming her sources and still boasting of being “first” on a story that was wrong.

More of her shoving blame on her sources:

Relying on the conclusions of American and foreign intelligence analysts and other experts I trusted, I, too, got WMD in Iraq wrong. But not because I lacked skepticism or because senior officials spoon-fed me a line.

Her denial that she was spoon-fed by Bush administration and its stooges is irrelevant at this point. Her sources were consistently singing the song of the Bush administration. She read reports by other journalists that contradicted her reports and wasn’t skeptical enough to pursue these contradictions. Whether she worked hard to get her sources to talk or they spoon-fed her (and whether they were senior officials or analysts) is really beside the point now. She was wrong, and she still hasn’t bothered to figure out why. So why should we think that she’s right about being spoon-fed? Here are two facts:

1. Journalists never know for sure about the motivations of their sources for talking to the press.
2. Journalists never know for sure whether our sources have talked to other people about what they should or shouldn’t tell us.

Given those facts and the undeniable reality that Miller screwed up the central facts of the biggest stories of her career, why should we believe her protestation that she wasn’t used by the Bush administration in its rush to war? If she wasn’t used, she certainly was useful, and I don’t much care about the difference.

The book also repeats a confession of unethical journalism — and a protest that it wasn’t unethical — in her dealings with I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney whom Miller went to prison protecting as a confidential source. She agreed in her interview with Libby to describe him, if she used anything from their conversation, as a “former Hill staffer,” a term that was accurate but intentionally misleading. Bristling about the criticism for this deception by Times columnist Maureen Dowd, Miller wrote:

She did not note that I had not identified Libby at all or written about his allegations. I would never have tried, or have been permitted, to identify Libby in print as a ‘former Hill staffer.’

In twenty-eight years at the paper, I had never once been accused of misrepresenting a source. I had agreed to Libby’s terms to hear his version of events. If his claims could be verified, I would have insisted on a more accurate description of him or refused to publish his account. This was a fairly common technique among investigative reporters. The Times style and standards book permits such intricate negotiations between reporters and their sources. As the paper’s policy on confidential sources states, there are occasions when ‘we may use an offer of anonymity as a wedge to make telephone contact, get an interview or learn a fact.’

Well, actually, she misrepresented dozens of sources as being knowledgeable about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, so that point was BS. But the passage from the standards book doesn’t support Miller’s agreement with Libby to deceive readers. An “offer of anonymity” is a world different from an agreement to use a misleading description of a source.

And whether Miller ever wrote a story using the misleading identification is irrelevant. The fact is that she, by her own admission, told the vice president’s chief of staff that she was willing to publish misleading information. And she never contradicted that statement to him by going back to him and trying to get him to agree to a different description. So that important person was entitled to read every story she wrote and every story in the Times and every story any journalist wrote, wondering what deceptions the journalists had agreed to (or decided on unilaterally). And he was entitled to tell the vice president and anyone else he wanted to about journalists’ willingness to deceive.

When Libby suggested “former Hill staffer” as a way to refer to him (and this only gets worse if it wasn’t Libby’s suggestion), that was an opportunity for Miller to educate him about journalism standards, or Times standards or her own standards. Sadly, she did educate him, at least about her standards, by agreeing. That she has no regret about that agreement is shameful enough, but she compounded that shame by smearing investigative journalism as a craft by calling her deceptive practice common. I never agreed to identify a source in a misleading way, and I am confident that few, if any, other investigative journalists would agree to do so, whether they followed through on the promise or not.

It’s interesting that Miller’s book came out the same week as the Columbia School of Journalism report on the Rolling Stone‘s botched coverage of a rape allegation at the University of Virginia.

In a similar way, Rolling Stone admitted error while blaming its source. Managing Editor Will Dana rejected the Columbia report’s statement that “The editors invested Rolling Stone’s reputation in a single source.”

In an interview with the Times, Dana said, “I think if you take a step back, our reputation rests on a lot more than this one story.”

The Times and Rolling Stone both have long histories of journalistic excellence. And Rolling Stone probably will recover, as the Times has recovered from the damage done by Miller and her colleagues in covering pre-war intelligence about WMD’s.

But Dana is wrong: Your reputation as a journalist or a publication rests on any and every story. Some readers will never again trust Rolling Stone or the Times, based on the egregious errors they published. Others take years to rebuild trust.

Miller’s memoir documents a distinguished career. But your reputation does rest on every story. Miller’s reputation has not recovered from the damage of her WMD reporting. More than a decade later, The Story won’t help repair the damage.

* Explanation note: In the passage from page 220, “Michael” was Times reporter Michael Gordon, with whom Miller had collaborated on a story about Iraq’s acquisition of aluminum tubes that were incorrectly suspected at the time as being centrifuges for use in making nuclear weapons. David Albright was a source of Miller’s, whom she or the editors cut out of their a follow-up story on the tubes. Correction: The original version of this post indicated Albright was a source cut from the original story about the aluminum tube, rather than a follow-up story.

Disclosures: Erik Wemple of the Washington Post, cited twice here, is a former colleague from our TBD days. Jerry Ceppos, my dean at LSU, was vice president for news at Knight-Ridder in the time before the invasion of Iraq. I was praising the Knight-Ridder coverage of WMD intelligence long before coming to LSU.

Update: I sought an email address for Miller, but neither her Simon & Schuster author page nor her bio at Fox News lists a way to reach her. If you have an email address for Miller, please send it to me (stephenbuttry — at — gmail — dot — com) and I will invite her to comment.

Update: Jack Shafer did an excellent critique of The Story for Politico. 

Previous mentions of the Miller case on this blog

Again: journalists, not sources, are responsible for the accuracy of our stories

SPJ’s ethics code ‘update’ proposal: just a few tweaks

Upholding and updating journalism ethics: My Colorado keynote

Anonymous sources: Factors to consider in using them (and don’t call them anonymous)

A 2005 handout on confidential sources: You didn’t hear this from me …

You can quote me on that: advice on attribution for journalists

Tips on crowdsourcing news, feature and investigative stories

My version of Craig Silverman’s accuracy checklist

Journalists’ Code of Ethics: Time for an update

Tips on verifying facts and ensuring accuracy

Accuracy is more important than ever for journalists

Jonathan Landay

I was perhaps not detailed enough in my criticism of Judith Miller’s memoir/fantasy book The Story: A Reporter’s Journey.

Jonathan Landay, a Knight-Ridder (now McClatchy) Washington reporter, nailed the story that Miller tragically botched in 2002-3 — pre-war intelligence about whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. He provided by email some details that I didn’t bother to round up.

It was self-abuse enough to read Miller’s book. I didn’t want to dig back and find the stories in question to check any of her claims in the book. And, after a quick read, I wanted to pump out my review, so I didn’t take the time to check exactly what was in the two Knight-Ridder stories she cited dismissively (or the many she ignored entirely).

Landay kindly filled in some gaps in an email exchange thanking me for my post (links added by me; I did finally look up those stories):

Just another thought: the story to which she referred in her book eviscerated — I like that word — her aluminum tubes story. She obliquely criticizes me for using only one named source, David Albright, despite the fact that virtually all of her sources were anonymous, especially on her tubes story.

OK, I just checked and in an article of nearly 3,500 words, Miller cited just two named sources. But one of the names was a pseudonym, “Ahmed al-Shemri,” an Iraqi defector who claimed to work in Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons program. He was quoted at length. Most of the rest of the article is attributed to various “Bush administration officials.” In The Story, Miller claims to have used lots of named sources in her WMD reporting. I’m not going to check all of her stories, but that wasn’t true of this one.

On Page 220 of The Story, in recounting how Times editors took her to task for failing to report the doubts revealed in a Landay article about whether the aluminum tubes could even be used as centrifuges to make nuclear weapons, Miller dismissed the Knight-Ridder story (though she attributed it to McClatchy) as based on unnamed sources:

It had quoted one source by name: David Albright.

More on Albright shortly, but, if you don’t count pseudonyms, her story on the same topic also quoted one source by name: a former Clinton administration official, Gary Samore, who didn’t provide any information about the aluminum tubes, but just speculated about how quickly Iraq might be able to develop nuclear weapons.

Interestingly, though, she names two of the Bush administration sources in her book, Robert Joseph and Susan Koch (presumably they agreed to be identified for the book). Though Miller frequently notes in the book when she quoted people by name, her description of the story on Page 214 of her book doesn’t mention how much it relied on unnamed sources, though one passage does indicate Joseph was not identified in her second article about the tubes.

Miller’s discussion of Albright (on Pages 214-217) is fascinating, especially in light of her noting his presence in Landay’s story and what he told Landay (that’s coming shortly). She had called Albright for the original article on the tubes, which ran on a Sunday. As she explained, he responded after it was published:

David Albright called back Tuesday. He had been overseas when he read our ‘tube’ story. ‘There is a problem,’ he told me. The governmental experts were divided about whether the aluminum tubes were intended to enrich uranium in a nuclear program or, rather, as several experts at the nation’s nuclear labs believed, intended for use in conventional artillery rockets.

The disclosure prompted work on a follow-up to the initial story about aluminum tubes. Miller was unable at first to find a source to corroborate what Albright had told her:

I called back David Albright. My sources were coming up cold, I told him. He suggested that I quote him about the tubes. Not without a second, confirming source, I replied. I begged him to call a few friends at the labs and urge them to talk to me. I assume he did and none of them would.

Miller contacted other sources, including Robert Joseph, President Bush’s senior adviser on proliferation. He confirmed that some analysts disagreed with the CIA assessment (that second confirmation she needed) but stressed that the CIA was adamant:

I was torn between experts I respected who disagreed. I had dealt with Bob Joseph on many stories. As far as I knew, he had never misled me. Though David Albright was a physicist and a former inspector, he had never examined an actual tube. In fact, as he had told me, he hadn’t participated in any of the intelligence community’s debates about it. Michael (Gordon) and I had the CIA on the record, plus the White House’s most senior nonproliferation official, on background, standing solidly by the claim.

Miller, by the way, doesn’t say whether Joseph claimed to have examined an actual tube, the failing she held against Albright.

The resulting story leads with a CIA report purporting to detail Iraq’s efforts to develop WMDs. The sixth paragraph mentions “debates among intelligence experts about Iraq’s intentions in trying to buy such tubes,” but is dismissive of the debate. Miller quoted a “senior administration official” (Joseph, she discloses in the book) as saying, ”This is a footnote, not a split.”

But she didn’t quote Albright. She had a former nuclear weapons inspector on the record describing the division in the intelligence community over the purpose of the tubes, but instead used an unnamed administration source downplaying the division.

If that seems as outrageous to you as it does to me, check out her (sort of) explanation:

David Albright’s objections to the administration’s tube claims did not appear in the final version. Perhaps his name was cut for space — or by me or the Washington bureau or foreign desk editors. I no longer remember or have the original draft. He was furious. Why had we suggested that the most experienced experts had sided with the CIA? And why hadn’t I quoted him?

Let me clue you in on a fact about reporters: We forget many things, but we do not forget when editors cut something from a story that we cared about. She probably left him out of her original draft. But let’s pretend that a New York Times editor cut that named source out of that story (I’m having trouble imagining that). If that happened, Miller didn’t care. Or she would remember.

When Miller encountered a potentially valuable source who was challenging the Bush administration line that she consistently reported, she blew him off and pissed him off, but can’t remember why. And yet she insisted repeatedly in the book that she was not “spoon-fed” by the Bush administration.

Back to Landay’s email, which shows that he placed more value on what Albright had to say:

But she didn’t make any reference to what I was quoting Albright on:

‘David Albright, a physicist and former U.N. weapons inspector, disputed the CIA’s assertion that a majority of analysts believe the tubes were intended to help make nuclear weapons.

‘Albright, the director of the Institute for Science and International Security, a non-partisan think tank, said he has been told that scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and other U.S. nuclear weapons facilities disagreed with that assessment but have been ordered not to say anything.

‘He quoted one scientist as saying that “the administration can say what it wants and we are expected to remain silent.”‘

Ponder that for a moment (consider this elaboration, not repetition): Miller used an unnamed Bush administration source and blew off a knowledgeable critic who:

1. Was willing to speak for the record.
2. Specifically disagreed with the administration line about the tubes.
3. Went on the record about efforts to silence critics.

One chapter of Miller’s book is titled “Scapegoat.” In the Epilogue, she elaborated:

That made me Azazel, the biblical goat upon which the community heaped its many sins.

However much other Times journalists might have sinned, this much is clear: Miller has not fully confessed her own journalistic sins.

Back to Landay:

​Moreover, she totally ignored this in the same story:

‘But the administration’s assertions about the aluminum tubes provoked considerable debate among nuclear weapons experts. One who reviewed a government analysis of the tubes said he did not believe they were intended for use in Iraq’s clandestine nuclear weapons program.

‘”From what I’ve seen, this is not conclusive evidence,” said the expert, who also spoke on condition of anonymity. He said that the tubes were not suitable for manufacturing into high-speed enrichment centrifuges because their diameters were too small and the aluminum they were made from was too hard.’

Finally, perhaps most egregiously, she ignored the fact that it was another of my stories debunking her report on the defector [Adnan Ihsan al Haideri] that helped force the NYT to print the editor’s note th​at her confrontation with Keller was all about:

‘On Dec. 20, 2001, another front-page article began, “An Iraqi defector who described himself as a civil engineer said he personally worked on renovations of secret facilities for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in underground wells, private villas and under the Saddam Hussein Hospital in Baghdad as recently as a year ago.” Knight Ridder Newspapers reported last week that American officials took that defector — his name is Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri — to Iraq earlier this year to point out the sites where he claimed to have worked, and that the officials failed to find evidence of their use for weapons programs. It is still possible that chemical or biological weapons will be unearthed in Iraq, but in this case it looks as if we, along with the administration, were taken in. And until now we have not reported that to our readers.’

As the NYT itself said last week, hers is a ‘sad and flawed book.’

Even sadder and more flawed than I realized when I ripped it yesterday. Thanks to Landay for shedding more light on today’s journalistic travesty that fails to defend, justify or even explain a journalistic travesty from more than a decade ago.

Seeking response: I can’t find an email address for Miller, but I will tweet at her, inviting response (and will post if she responds). I also will invite responses from Albright and Joseph.

I am dismayed by the continuing refusal of respected media companies to re-examine and correct their reporting when confronted with documentation of their errors.

I blogged about this problem in August, calling attention to puff pieces in the New York Times, San Francisco Examiner, CBS, NBC and other media, depicting Pari Livermore as a matchmaker who paired widowed and divorced middle-aged people in return for donations to “charities.”

Nancy Levine

None of the media checked out Livermore’s charities thoroughly enough to learn that her favored charity, Spotlight on Heroes, wasn’t registered as a charity at all. The person who did the digging to learn that was Nancy Levine, a potential client. Levine reached out to me after being blown off by media organizations she approached, seeking a correction or update to their old puff pieces, which showed up in Internet searches, lending credibility to Livermore.

Before my August post, I emailed Livermore, inviting response, and I received no reply. I emailed again for this post and Livermore said she “did mess up the paperwork” for Spotlight on Heroes, sending something to the wrong address. She did not explain why the paperwork didn’t get straightened out and did not answer when I asked her repeatedly whether Spotlight was registered now as a charity. She claimed to have sent me an email (she didn’t say when), but a search of my inbox showed no messages from her. (She sent one Monday, listing work she says her matchmaking donations have supported.)

I can almost, sort of, kind of, nearly buy some media’s initial response to Levine. The stories were old and you could, in the quick read that many complaints receive from editors and news directors, conclude that the errors weren’t serious enough to demand a thorough review or a correction this long after the fact.

But I can’t get there. Levine is thorough and persistent (she would make a hell of an investigative reporter). She provided these news organizations (and me) with extensive documentation that Livermore’s charity, at the least, was not registered properly. If the lack of registration was an innocent mistake, the charitable donations that these puff pieces virtually encouraged were not tax-deductible, and that oversight certainly needed to be corrected. The story demands more investigation by any organization that published puff pieces.

Levine did not approach these media outlets with speculation that an old story might be wrong. She showed them that their stories still show up in Internet searches and she presented the media with extensive documentation that their stories were wrong, not just in details but in their very premise.

I wouldn’t just correct a story based on the documentation Levine provided, but those documents would make new reporting pretty easy. So far, the Marin Independent Journal is the only news organization to publish a new story this year after publishing a puff piece on Livermore back in 2007-8, when she was promoting a book. BuzzFeed and the Daily Beast didn’t run puff pieces, but, at Levine’s prompting, documented that Livermore’s favored charity, Spotlight on Heroes, isn’t actually registered as a charity.

I can see that editors and news directors might find Levine’s persistence annoying (see my comment about her potential as an investigative reporter; investigative reporters can be intensely annoying, especially when they are on a hot trail). But she provided newsroom after newsroom with documentation that challenged the very premises of their stories. How is that not a code-red situation demanding immediate action, investigation and correction by the news organization?

I was joined in recent email exchanges with Levine by Deni Elliott, Eleanor Poynter Jamison Chair in Media Ethics and Press Policy at the University of South Florida in St. Petersburg. Elliott has done considerable research on journalists’ gullible coverage of charities and other feel-good stories. This is the first of two related posts. Tomorrow I’ll have a guest post, compiled mostly from Elliott’s emails on this topic (with her permission).

Most egregious of the media’s continued dismissal of inquiries from Levine (and me) has been the New York Times, which I once regarded (and you might still regard) as the pinnacle of American journalism. The Times’ puff piece on Livermore still shows up high in Google searches, and the newspaper’s refusal to re-examine its own reporting truly appalls me. I’ll detail similar dismissiveness from other media later, but I didn’t hold any of them in as high regard as I held the Times, so I’ll start with the Times.

New York Times responses

2007 New York Times puff piece on Pari Livermore

Before I wrote my August post, and again more than a week ago when I started work on this post, I invited comment from four Times journalists — Executive Editor Dean Baquet, Standards Editor Phil Corbett, Public Editor Margaret Sullivan and travel columnist Stephanie Rosenbloom (who wrote the 2007 feature on Livermore).

Corbett and Sullivan responded to me both times. Baquet responded to Levine in August, but not to me either time. Rosenbloom’s email sent an autoreply in August, saying she was traveling. I got no reply in September.

Some thoughts on the responses and non-responses:

Margaret Sullivan

When Nancy Levine first contacted me about this, I sent her correspondence to the national desk and the styles desk at The Times. (She had at that time already heard from Dean Baquet directly.) As public editor, I can’t make story assignments, but I did suggest in a cover note that a followup story be considered. As far as I know, nothing came of that.

I haven’t written about this case in a post or column, but I am considering it. It’s a little out of bounds for me in that the original story is from 2007 and my practice is to look at coverage during the time I have been the public editor which began in 2012. (As you can imagine, if I start to look back at stories from many years ago, it would be overwhelming. But, as you have observed, there have been developments since then, and the overall question is an interesting one.)

I believe Sullivan’s response is reasonable. The needed Times response here should come from the other editors she mentioned. But the most important development since then has been the Times editors’ refusal/failure to re-investigate and report a story whose very premise at the time it was published has been challenged. That’s a current issue at the Times, and I hope Sullivan decides to address the topic.

It’s more important for the Times that editors who are in charge of things address this issue. Though Sullivan is not in charge of the Times or its corrections, she is an internal reporter/critic, and this story — and the weak response from Times editors — cries for internal examination.

Phil Corbett

Corbett’s response to me in August asked if I had done work that, in my view, the Times should have been doing:

Have you done more reporting about Pari Livermore? Have you confirmed that she stole or misappropriated money? (By my reading, Buzzfeed didn’t). If so, I’d be very interested to learn what you have unearthed. I’m less interested if you are just writing a speculative story about a puzzling buzzfeed story tangentially related to a nine-year-old Times story about someone who may or may not have done something that you don’t actually have any information about.

You don’t necessarily have to factcheck an email before hitting “send,” but for the accuracy of my own post, I should note that the Times story will be eight years old in November. But this fascinates me: Corbett is right that the BuzzFeed story didn’t confirm (or even allege) that Livermore stole or misappropriated money. What it did confirm is that at least some of the fund-raising that the Times story described as charitable (more on that shortly) was for an organization that wasn’t a charity. And Corbett was asking me if I had done more reporting on Livermore, when it was the Times that did the inaccurate reporting in the first place. But I had done (and was still doing) more reporting. So I responded (fixing a wrong word choice from the original message):

I am not finished with my reporting, but, yes, I have done some, and I have checked some of the documentation that Nancy Levine provided to Margaret and Dean (and perhaps you?). For instance, I have not yet heard back from Kristin Ford, press secretary for the California AG, but I have confirmed that the AG’s office regulates charities and that the email Levine sent the Times, saying that Spotlight on Heroes was not registered as a charity, was from Ford’s email address. I also have confirmed that the mailing address for Spotlight in the 2007 flier promoting Ms. Livermore’s Red & White Ball, is Ms. Livermore’s address. I have not confirmed that she stole or misappropriated money, but I will not allege that and neither did BuzzFeed. But I expect to confirm that she directed (and still directs) contributions to a charity that is not registered and that uses her home address. Quite a different picture from the Times puff piece.

My reporting is not finished yet, but I am pretty confident I have done more reporting on this charity than the Times did in 2007. Between my own reporting, the BuzzFeed reporting (which was actually quite solid) and the reporting by Richard Halstead of the Marin Independent Journal, I am doubtful that the Times vetted this story well at all in 2007. If someone challenged a story this way at a paper where I was editor, even an eight-year-old story, I would be investigating and correcting, if the investigation confirmed what I’ve seen so far. That uncorrected story is still the No. 4 hit on Google when you search Livermore’s name, 4 slots above the BuzzFeed story.

Also, here’s a passage from my draft:

I don’t know how much research Rosenbloom did for the 2007 Times story, but some of the information in her story closely matches Livermore’s Amazon author blurb.

From the Times story:

In the last 19 years her introductions and singles parties have resulted in more than 200 marriages and raised about $3 million for nonprofit organizations including the American Cancer Society, the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation and the American Heart Association.

From Amazon:

More than 200 couples have been married as a result of her efforts and fundraising parties. … During the past 17 years she has raised more than $3 million collectively for such organizations as the American Cancer Society, the Susan G. Komen for the Cure, the Family Caregivers Alliance, Children’s Garden, and the San Francisco Boys & Girls Club.

The $3 million claim is repeated in other stories, which I’ll detail at the end of this post. The stories show growing numbers of the marriages claimed from Livermore’s matches.

Does parroting authors’ publicity materials, without attribution, meet Times standards?

FYI, I have also emailed Stephanie Rosenbloom, asking questions about her reporting.

Thanks for your quick response,

Steve

Corbett’s response on Aug. 22:

Sorry if my reply was curt. I did review this when it first came up a couple of weeks ago. I didn’t see any specific challenge to the facts in the Times story, which did not mention this particular charity. It also was not clear to me that there was any major scandal or malfeasance here, based on the reporting I saw. (As I recall, officials at the school or schools that were supposed to benefit said they did indeed get the donations, though again, the Times story didn’t cover that ground.) I didn’t see any indication that the authorities were investigating or pursuing allegations of wrongdoing. On the whole, I wasn’t convinced that this called for re-reporting this old story.

I will certainly read your post when I return to New York on August 31, and will reconsider if it seems necessary.

Thanks for being so forthright in your approach.

A few comments on this: I didn’t care about Corbett being “curt” in his initial response. He was, but I’ve been a journalist for 40-plus years. I’ve dealt with hundreds of curt editors and have been one myself. I expect a curt tone from editors and they often get one from me, without apology.

I was fascinated, and disturbed, though, by the content of both messages: the implication that someone else needed to prove malfeasance or theft in order for the Times to correct an inaccurate reference to a charity ball. And he didn’t even mention the parroting of promotional materials, so I guess that meets Times standards?

I also was fascinated at the dismissive attitude toward a BuzzFeed story that absolutely nailed the Times and other media who lavished Livermore with “glowing profiles.” BuzzFeed’s name is the very antithesis of the New York Times. Even the 2014 Times Innovation Report, which actually had lots of praise for BuzzFeed’s digital savvy and was exploring how the Times could make similar digital strides, couldn’t resist a dig at BuzzFeed’s “lackluster content” (page 63). But in this case, BuzzFeed has been the better watchdog. By far. That should have rung alarm bells for the Times Standards Editor. But instead, he was scornful that BuzzFeed had not confirmed actual theft (which it never alleged).

I got a much shorter reply from Corbett when I emailed him for this Post, asking if the Times had corrected the story or was re-examining it:

Thanks for the update. No new developments on this end.

I pushed Corbett for more explanation, so he sent another email yesterday:

I understand your concerns and I think you’ve raised legitimate questions. But you won’t be surprised to hear that I disagree with your conclusion that The Times doesn’t care about the accuracy or integrity of our reporting.

We have a full-time standards editor, a full-time public editor, a full-time corrections editor, and two full-time assistants working on issues like this. I know you think we’ve dropped the ball on this one (and you’re by no means the first person to question my judgment or basic competence), but I hope you don’t despair of The Times as a whole.

This may seem like excuse-making, but a bit of context here. The Times publishes something like 70,000 pieces of journalism a year. Over eight years, that’s more than half a million pieces. Certainly there are times when we would feel we have to re-examine or re-report an eight-year-old story — that’s half a million stories ago — but realistically the bar is going to be somewhat high.

You think this case crosses that bar, and you may be right. I decided that it didn’t, though I will try to keep an open mind and reserve the option of changing course.  It wouldn’t be the first time.

Some stories prompt dozens, scores, even hundreds of questions, complaints or demands for correction or revision. This one, as far as I know, drew just one question, eight years or so after publication. It’s a legitimate and substantive question, but it didn’t seem to me to take obvious precedence over many other pressing and more current concerns.

You clearly disagree, and I respect the diligence you’ve brought to this.

I do disagree, though I appreciate the context and detail that Corbett added. I’m bothered by his lumping Levine’s detailed documentation with all those other questions and demands for correction, most of which, I’m sure lack documentation. I received lots of questions and requests for corrections myself through my 16-plus years as an editor, and I can’t recall as detailed and documented a complaint from a reader. While I am sure that my own experience with reader response is nowhere near the scale of the New York Times, I also am confident that the vast majority of those 70,000 pieces of journalism a year don’t generate documented challenges to their accuracy.

If the Times doesn’t think this old puff piece is worth further investigation, it doesn’t even have to investigate itself: It could update the original story to link to the BuzzFeed and/or Daily Beast stories, noting that new reporting has challenged the validity of Livermore’s favored charity (I wouldn’t expect a link to my blog). Once you know an inaccurate story is still showing up high in search results, you should update in some fashion.

I won’t address Corbett’s question about the reporting of apparently legitimate donations related to Livermore’s matchmaking. Deni Elliott will address that topic at some length tomorrow.

I also won’t address here Corbett’s hope that I “don’t despair for the Times as a whole.” This post will focus on the narrower issue of correcting old stories and responding to reader challenges to your accuracy. But I will explain my broader view of the Times separately in a later post.

Dean Baquet

Baquet did not respond to me in August or September. That would be OK if someone else were doing something. But, as I noted in the August post, Baquet did respond to Levine when she wrote him in August, so we know he is aware of the Times’ flawed story. The puff piece didn’t happen on his watch, but the error was called to the Times’ attention on his watch, and the uncorrected Times story is still generating page views and ad impressions for the Times on his watch.

I’m not saying that correcting an eight-year-old story is the executive editor’s job or demands much of his attention. But, in the time that he took to write his 125-word email response to Levine, Baquet could have and should have instructed Corbett and/or other appropriate Times journalists to investigate whether the story was flawed (it was) and needed to be rereported, updated and corrected (it does). Accuracy and integrity are worth whatever time they demand, however big or busy your newsroom.

Just nine days before Baquet’s dismissive response to Levine, the Times published multiple corrections on a horribly inaccurate story about Hillary Clinton. Baquet should not have regarded this as a trivial matter in an eight-year-old story. It was and is a symptom of a huge, current problem for the Times: accuracy and verification.

Stephanie Rosenbloom

Except for the autoreply, I have received no response from Rosenbloom. I don’t know what her editors expect of her, or what her personal professional standards are. But apparently at either or both levels, they don’t include responding to challenges to the accuracy of her work.

That disappoints me. I can think of nothing more important for a journalist than accuracy and credibility. I’m not going to dwell further on criticism of Rosenbloom here, but clearly we have different personal standards for our journalism and how we respond to challenges to our reporting. You’ll get a response if you challenge the accuracy of my work from any point in my career: either documentation of my verification, questions about your challenge or a promise that I’ll get back to you after I do more research.

The Times’ error

I covered this matter in more detail in my August post, but this much deserves repeating here: In parsing whether to publish a correction in this case, the Times is hiding behind the fact that Rosenbloom’s story never mentioned Spotlight on Heroes (Corbett mentioned that in his Aug. 22 email to me). But the story made seven references to “charity,” “charities” or “charitable” donations. While some of those references might cover some actual charities, The Times should check out whether donations to Spotlight are included in each of those references. Charity was so much the premise of the Times story that the headline reflected it: “Fall in love for a good cause.”

But if it’s only specific facts, not the premise of a story, that merit corrections, the 2007 Red & White ball (check the invitation posted at right), earlier in the year that the Times published its story, purported to raise money for Spotlight on Heroes, inviting people to send their checks to Livermore’s home address. And here’s what the Times story said about that:

… Ms. Livermore’s Red & White Ball, a singles charity event held every other year in San Francisco that attracts up to 1,000 attendees.

That passage needs a correction. It used the word “charity” to refer to an event that raised about $175,000 (multiplying the Times estimate of attendance by the ticket price) for an organization that has never been registered as a charity in California. Even if it was just a paperwork error (and you’d think it would have been corrected in eight years), the Times needs to learn that and update the story.

I am completely mystified by the Times journalists’ failure to take this challenge to a story more seriously.

Other media responses

For both this post and my August post, I also contacted other media outlets who published or broadcast profiles of Livermore. As I noted in the previous post, I did hear back from GQ writer Alan Deutschman, whose profile in the 1990s predates Levine’s documentation, and Marin Independent Journal Editor Robert Sterling, whose newspaper re-examined Livermore and her charitable affiliations after the BuzzFeed piece. (Update: Sterling has blogged on this issue.)

CBS News, NBC’s “Today Show” and the San Francisco Examiner have not responded to my invitations for comment either in August or September.

George Osterkamp of CBS News, producer of the network’s 2008 puff piece on Livermore, did respond to Levine, but CBS has not updated or corrected its reporting on her.

Richard Greenberg of NBC also responded to Levine, but NBC has not corrected its story. I have written him as well (later than I wrote the others seeking response for this post) and will update if I hear from him.

Why correct?

This section applies to all the media, but I will return my focus to the Times. Corrections are important externally because they remind readers/viewers of your commitment to accuracy. Corrections are important internally because they remind staff of your commitment to accuracy, verification and integrity.

The bar you have to clear to correct a fact should be simple and not that high: Was a fact wrong? The Times recently misidentified Han Solo’s starship as the Millennium Force and quickly corrected, without, I presume, asking others to do any sort of reporting, as Corbett suggested I do for the Times (and as Levine had already done). It was a trivial point, but the original fact was wrong and the Times corrected.

The Society of Professional Journalists addresses this matter quite simply in its Code of Ethics, with two bullets in its “Act independently and transparently” section:

• Respond quickly to questions about accuracy, clarity and fairness.
• Acknowledge mistakes and correct them promptly and prominently.

Poynter’s Guiding Principles for the Journalist is similarly clear:

Acknowledge mistakes and errors, correct them quickly and in a way that encourages people who consumed the faulty information to know the truth.

The Online News Association’s Build Your Own Ethics Code project recognizes lots of different ethical issues on which journalists might disagree, but corrections are one of the “fundamentals” on which we think all journalists should agree:

Correct errors quickly, completely and visibly. Make it easy for your audience to bring errors to your attention.

ONA’s project includes a separate section on corrections, guiding news organizations in developing strong policies to implement that fundamental principle.

The newly updated Code of Ethics of the Radio Television Digital News Association:

Ethical journalism requires owning errors, correcting them promptly and giving corrections as much prominence as the error itself had.

The New York Times actually goes into more detail than any of these codes (except ONA) in its own Standards and Ethics:

Because our voice is loud and far-reaching, The Times recognizes an ethical responsibility to correct all its factual errors, large and small. …

We correct our errors explicitly as soon as we become aware of them. We do not wait for someone to request a correction. We publish corrections in a prominent and consistent location or broadcast time slot.

Here’s what the Times’ Ethics and Standards say about integrity:

Whatever else we contribute, our first duty is to make sure the integrity of The Times is not blemished during our stewardship.  At a time of growing and even justified public suspicion about the impartiality, accuracy and integrity of some journalists and some journalism, it is imperative that The Times and its staff maintain the highest possible standards to insure that we do nothing that might erode readers’ faith and confidence in our news columns. This means that the journalism we practice daily must be beyond reproach.

I was contacted by a reader whose faith and confidence in the Times’ integrity was strong enough that she wrote out a check for $1,000 to an organization that is not registered as a charity, based in part on the credibility that a Times story about charitable fund-raising conferred on the person soliciting the check. Levine did a little more checking and ended up not mailing that check. But her faith and confidence have been shattered by the Times’ gullibility in this story and its continuing refusal, when confronted by documentation of the story’s inaccuracy, to correct it or even re-examine it.

And I’m sure she’s not the only person who’s written a check based on the Times’ incomplete reporting. The Marin Independent Journal’s 2007 story about Livermore, published just 10 days after the Times story, quoted Livermore saying she had received 143 calls from prospective matchmaking clients since the Times published its story.

And who knows how many more, like Levine, have found the story on search since those first 143 calls. That’s why it’s inexcusable that the Times doesn’t correct or update this story. And because someone else might find the story on search this week.

Here’s what I’d like to know (from other Times staffers, if you want to weigh in, since the responses from Corbett, Baquet and Rosenbloom have been so disappointing; but also from anyone at CBS, NBC or the San Francisco Examiner):

• Did I miss some statute of limitations in the Times standards that applies to corrections?
• How does this story not merit a correction or at least a re-examination to determine whether it needs a correction?
• How does the Times’ response to Levine meet the Times’ standards?

Nancy Levine

I won’t detail all my many exchanges with Levine on this topic. She’s not a journalist, but an executive recruiter, who does background checks on potential recruits. And she’s good at it. She illustrates a point I’ve long believed: That journalists can learn a lot from people in other fields who use some of the same skills that we use.

Here are some documents she has sent me links to that journalists should have found either in their original reporting in 2007-8 or in the new reporting they refuse to do today:

• A IRS 990 form documenting a 2006 charitable donation to Spotlight on Heroes from the J.V. Lowney Fund. On Page 11, the form lists a $2,400 donation and identifies Spotlight as a charity. (Journalists covering charities should always check for their 990 forms, which are public records, and which, of course, Spotlight on Heroes never filed, since it wasn’t a charity.)
• Another 990 form documenting a $2,000 “charitable” donation to Spotlight on Heroes in 2012 by the Seligman Family Foundation. Spotlight had been suspended in 2009 by the California Franchise Tax Board for non-payment of taxes.
• A 990 form from the California Study, reporting an $8,500 grant to Spotlight in 2009. Livermore claimed in an August interview with the Marin Independent Journal that Spotlight on Heroes that “Spotlight is part of The California Study. Our 501(c)3 number comes under their umbrella.” She did not explain how it would be legal for the Study to make grants to an organization with no standing as a charity. Marilyn Nemzer, executive director of The California Study Inc., told the Daily Beast that media coverage of Spotlight on Heroes’ non-registered status “have been misleading gossip.” 
• A 2010 990 for the Sidney E. Frank Foundation reported a $2,500 donation to the California Study for Spotlight on Heroes.

I think Levine has shown without question that Livermore was seeking donations for an operation that’s not a registered charity. This year Livermore asked Levine for a check for Spotlight on Heroes, Levine says (and documents with screen grabs of an email exchange).

Am I the only journalist disturbed that an angry almost-victim is doing better investigation of this operation than the respected news organizations that boosted Livermore’s business with puff pieces you can still find online if you’re looking for a matchmaker?

Tomorrow: Deni Elliott discusses weaknesses in media reporting on charities.

Update: Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan has blogged about the Livermore story.

Stubbornness can lead to some outstanding journalism. But it also can cause journalists to stand by stories that need to be corrected or re-examined.

I think it’s time to say the New York Times is just being stubborn in its refusal to update or correct its inaccurate 2007 story about Pari Livermore.

Nearly three months after Nancy Levine, a potential client of Livermore’s, called to Times editors’ attention the failings of the 2007 story, five different journalists have investigated Livermore’s matchmaking efforts and the “charitable” donations she asks clients to make in return for her service. (And I’m not counting August and October posts on this blog.) All of the investigations, including a post Sunday by Marc Gunther in Nonprofit Chronicles, have found the same thing: Livermore’s favored “charity,” Spotlight on Heroes, has never been registered as a charity.

Unless all of these investigations are wrong, the Times should correct its story.

The technicality Times editors cite in not correcting or even re-examining the 2007 Times story by Stephanie Rosenbloom is that it did not mention Spotlight on Heroes. But the whole premise of the story was Livermore’s blend of matchmaking and philanthropy. The story referred to the 2007 Red & White Ball as a “charity event,” even though 2007 promotional materials for the ball directed ticket buyers to make out their $175 checks to Spotlight on Heroes. I don’t know of any journalism ethical code, including the Times’ Standards and Ethics, that doesn’t require correcting errors, and that “charity event” reference clearly was an error, even if you don’t think a fundamentally flawed eight-year-old story needs deeper re-examination.

I’m not going to revisit here all the points I made in the earlier posts. But I do want to call the attention of journalists who write about charities to two helpful resources Gunther cited:

• Lawyer Gene Takagi‘s Nonprofit Law 101 for Journalists
• The IRS page for checking whether a nonprofit is registered

I’m also posting to note the Gunther piece and the other four investigations of Livermore and Spotlight on Heroes (three of which I’ve noted in earlier posts):

• Nonprofit Quarterly’s Fund-Raising for Unregistered Charity: a Simple Mistake or Something More by Amy Butcher. (The Butcher and Gunther pieces both cited and linked to my blog.)
• Daily Beast’s Where Is the Matchmaker’s Charity Money? by Cerise Castle
• Marin Independent Journal’s San Rafael celebrity matchmaker’s fundraising practices questioned by Richard Halstead
• BuzzFeed’s Famous Matchmaker’s Pet Charity Wasn’t A Charity At All by Kendall Taggart

As disappointing as the Times’ response to Levine’s call for a correction has been, I am pleased that other journalists have filled the void with strong investigative and explanatory journalism.

This eight-year-old puff piece the Times has stubbornly refused to correct may not seem like a big deal, certainly not as important as hundreds of stories the Times has pursued stubbornly in the face of considerable obstacles, producing some of the best investigative journalism in history. But this passage from Gunther’s post nails why the Times should correct this story:

As Albert Einstein has said: ‘Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted important matters.’

Response note: I included responses from Livermore and Times editors in previous posts, particularly the Oct. 6 post, which included a lengthy response from Times Standards Editor Phil Corbett as well as a response from Livermore. I didn’t invite response before posting today, since this post doesn’t report anything new, other than linking to the Gunther and Butcher pieces. I will invite their response to this post and update if any have anything more to say.

Update: Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan has blogged about the Livermore story.

I was updating some slides for a class on writing for social media last week and wanted to update the memes I used early in the class.

When I taught a similar class last spring, I used some Rand Paul memes to illustrate points after using some Hillary Clinton memes. The Republican race didn’t have a clear front-runner, but Paul had inspired some pro and con memes that fit the writing points I was making in class. In both cases, I wasn’t trying to make partisan points about the candidates (and used pro and con memes about each of them). I was just trying to use timely points about applying the craft of writing to memes.

Paul is lagging in the Republican presidential polls, though, so I updated my slides last week with some memes of Donald Trump and Ben Carson.

Within a week, my Carson memes were out of date. A gusher of memes was fueled by Carson’s speculation that the Egyptian pyramids were built for storing grain, followed by media debunking of his claims about getting a “full scholarship” offer to West Point, meeting Gen. William Westmoreland as a young high school ROTC cadet, behaving violently in his youth and a story about a hoax by a professor at Yale. (I’m working on a subsequent post on fact-checking, relating to these stories and Carson’s response to them.)

Each of the stories prompted more memes, including some that played on humor from multiple Carson stories.

I don’t know whether memes are a permanent form of writing that will endure, or whether they will pass as a fad. But clearly writing in social media, for now, is a matter of both the visual effect of blending words and photos and the visual use of type fonts, sizes and styles.

From a journalism standpoint, the meme combines many of the principles and techniques of headline writing with newer social-media writing techniques.

I’ve never claimed expertise in design, but I expand here (with some newer Carson memes added to the ones I used in class) on the points I made in classes last week about writing in memes:

Ben Carson memes

My former Digital First Media colleague, Ryan Teague Beckwith, did a great story in 2012 about Barack Obama as our first meme president.

Now memes are a regular part of the social media conversation about politics. Whether they love or hate Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders or Carson, partisans express their opinions, often with humor, in memes. You blend words and images to make a clear point supporting your candidate or mocking the opponent. If political campaigns don’t already have meme specialists, they will soon. I know of news organizations that have posted memes on social media to promote stories. I don’t know whether that will become standard, but I would be experimenting with it if I were in a newsroom someday.

Below are some Carson memes I used in last week’s classes, with some advice on writing memes (updated with a few memes that came out since my classes ended last Wednesday):

I used this meme to illustrate the importance of brevity, font and choosing when and whether to use all-caps in a meme. The quote is probably too long for an effective meme, especially for an all-caps meme. At the very least, the attribution in the last two lines needed to be a different font in caps and lower case.

This one isn’t in all-caps, but is still too long to be effective as a meme. A meme should provoke an immediate reaction and this one requires reading extended text in white type on black background, which makes reading harder. White type on black background should almost always be large type to be easily readable.

The meme above makes the same point as the previous one. The points are still too long, though, too much type for all-caps. It also squeezes the face too closely between the type. A meme demands a strong image, even if it’s just a talking head, and the type overwhelms the photo here. The “hypocrisy, much?” tagline should stand out from the rest of the type.

This Carson meme is a much better use of all caps. Many effective all-cap memes follow this writing style: two short blocks of text at the top and bottom, related but each making a separate point, tied together by a strong image.

This shows that you can cover a lot of ground in a few words in an effective meme. This imagined quote doesn’t try to explain too much, but manages to mock two challenged Carson claims: That he had a violent temper in his youth and spurned a “full scholarship” from West Point. Perfect choice of photo, too, with fists clenched (even if one of them is holding what appears to be a remote-control of some kind).

The meme above shows how varying the typeface makes a meme more effective. The quote is still fairly long, but works better than the longer, all-caps memes higher up in this post.

This meme probably could use slightly larger type (at least in the top line), but it shows the importance of brevity in choosing words. It also illustrates the importance of matching the words with the image.

This is effective use of all-caps. Both halves of the text are short and readable, and the photo is immediately recognizable, again playing on themes of Carson’s week in the meme spotlight. You don’t need to use the subject’s photo in every meme.

Update: I added this after the initial post. Takes a similar approach to the Coliseum and Stonehenge memes. I like that it makes the point in just two words

The text is used fairly effectively here, with a large font and caps and lower case for words that might be too much in all-caps. But the Willy Wonka image of Gene Wilder has probably been overused and should be retired from meme use. I can agree with you or disagree, but when I see the Willy Wonka meme, I usually just keep scrolling.

The “most interesting man in the world” is probably approaching Willy Wonka status in terms of meme overuse. The words here probably aren’t clever enough to carry of this meme.

Perhaps it’s because I enjoyed the Kansas City Royals’ extra-inning heroics so much, but I thought this most-interesting-man meme was more effective. Certainly more clever than the Carson one using the same image.

Repeating the meme I used at the top of this post, this meme blends two images, using a quote bubble for the words, which get quickly to the point, mocking Carson’s bizarre speculation about the pyramids. It was the best use I saw in the Carson memes to use words and visuals together to convey a message.

Some tweets from my students, echoing the meme-writing points I was making in class.

The use of all-caps and large amounts of text diminish the effectiveness of a meme #manship2010 pic.twitter.com/FRuLvuZGAQ

— Rachel Campbell (@rachelcaampbell) November 4, 2015

Good meme! The scripted font is more engaging than ALL CAPS. The attribution in a different font. #Manship2010 pic.twitter.com/A21idDU3Yg

— Chelsea Tassin (@ChelseaTassin) November 3, 2015

The quote and attribution are the same size/caps. It doesn’t quite work. Make the attribution smaller. #Manship2010 pic.twitter.com/0Ct3IXAGsV

— Chelsea Tassin (@ChelseaTassin) November 3, 2015

“Memes seek instant reactions” xd #manship2010 pic.twitter.com/K2pxcYk3L6

— Raymond Stratton (@Doctor_RayRay) November 4, 2015

Hillary has her share of memes, pro and con (see the slides I used in my class), and Donald Trump is great meme fodder (also featured in the class slides). If memes had existed during Bill Clinton’s or Ronald Reagan’s presidencies, one of them might be the all-time meme champion (they still show up occasionally). I show one from each below, the first effective because of sparing use of all-caps, the second an example of using caps and lower case with a quote that’s not too long:

What other memes are effective?

How have you used memes (or seen others use them) to make humorous or serious points in social media? Share links to memes you like (or dislike) in the comments and I’ll either add them to the post or do another post on memes. They don’t have to be Carson memes. I picked on him because he’s been so popular in memes lately.

Or share your own memes here. You can do so easily with meme tools for Carson, Hillary Clinton, Trump and more politicians.

Slides for my class

Here are the slides for my class on writing (including memes) for social media:

Thanks to New York Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan for providing the first acknowledgment by anyone at the Times of a fundamentally flawed story I have noted here before.

I won’t revisit the saga of a 2007 Times puff piece about matchmaker Pari Livermore here. Read the links below if you want the background. The story’s premise was flawed and it inaccurately referred to a “charity event,” when the primary beneficiary was not registered as a charity. I think the Times should have corrected the story, regardless of its age (Sullivan called for an follow-up, not a correction). While we disagree about the need for a correction, I applaud Sullivan’s acknowledgment that the Times should have followed up on it when it learned about its flawed premise.

Nancy Levine

On one point I will heartily agree with Sullivan. Nancy Levine contacted Sullivan and me after she almost made a donation to Livermore, after finding and reading the Times story. But Levine, an executive recruiter, did a little more checking and learned that Spotlight on Heroes, the organization Livermore told her to make the check out to, wasn’t actually registered as a charity.

Levine has sent dozens of emails to Sullivan, other Times editors, other media editors and directors, California legislators and regulators. Sullivan described Levine as “one of the most persistent people I’ve ever come in contact with.” That I can attest to. This, not so much:

I’ll note that Mr. Buttry is almost as dogged as Ms. Levine.

No, I’m not nearly as dogged as Nancy is. She is also one of the most persistent people I’ve ever come in contact with. The media need persistent, dogged people to hold us accountable. Thanks, Nancy!

Twitter reactions

Lookslike @stevebuttry managed to wear down the tough @Sulliview – shall we call it a truce? :) https://t.co/FbM6ZxUvOV

— barbara raab (@bbabbo1) November 14, 2015

@bbabbo1 @stevebuttry @Sulliview I’m looking forward to how he will torment @jimbrady about ESPN stuff

— Matt DeRienzo (@mattderienzo) November 14, 2015

@TPrice504 @Sulliview @stevebuttry The story was incorrect when published. “Charity” event not a charity. I’ll take Wikipedia over incorrect

— nancy levine (@nancylevine) November 14, 2015

Previous posts relating to the Times Livermore story

Is there a statute of limitations on correcting errors or updating flawed stories?

Why are journalists so reluctant to correct and re-examine challenged stories?

Deni Elliott: Journalists often fail to think beyond ‘Charity = GOOD’

Other journalists correct a story the New York Times stubbornly refuses to correct

These tweets early in the San Bernardino shooting Wednesday attracted a lot of media attention, including a blog post from me last night and the initial version of this post (most of which will be retained here, with updates noted):

As I noted in both posts, this was either an eyewitness who could provide helpful accounts for reporters working on a breaking news story or a prankster playing the media. She answered tonight:

“Marie’s” success included a telephone interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper and a bogus “Gamergate” reference in an AP story that was published online by the New York Times.

My own original version of this post raised doubts about her. But I concluded she was probably legit (but I said wouldn’t use her tweets in a breaking news story without a phone interview). We never had a phone interview (though I gave her my number), but I thought my analysis of her media interactions fit well in the context of a blog that addresses media issues. Despite some passages that are now embarrassing, I think most of it holds up as valid analysis. I hope it improved after the liar started boasting about the hoax.

Let’s be clear about several things here:

1. You can call it a prank, “Marie,” but it’s also a lie. That may make you smarter than some journalists, but you’re still a liar.
2. Exploiting a tragedy for fun and laughs is lower on the scale of humanity than whatever you think media do in seeking to interview witnesses to tragedies. Enjoy your end zone dance, but I think you should attend the funerals of each of the San Bernardino victims whose deaths gave you such glee.
3. “Marie” didn’t expose “the media.” She exposed a few media outlets (albeit some big ones; more on them later). As far as I can tell, most journalists who contacted “Marie” didn’t use her story. Some told me privately that they were skeptical. I will be asking them if I can use their time-stamped expressions of skepticism, all before her victory tweet.

Another important point here is that this may not be a one-woman (if “Marie” is, in fact, a woman) hoax. Shortly before she started her end-zone dance on Twitter, I had a direct-message exchange with a possible co-conspirator (unless this is another lie) who had posed as a CNN reporter early in her exchanges with the media. Some other fakes (detailed below in the original post along with the fake-CNN reporter) might also be co-conspirators.

Here are my DMs to and from “Paul Town,” the fake CNN reporter:

For what it’s worth, I don’t think you fight for ethics in journalism, by lying, so that’s just another lie. I did note Marie’s tie to Gamergate, a running controversy over sexual harassment and conflict in video game development, in the original post.

Some journalists were skeptical from the first

Andrew Seaman of Reuters first called Marie to my attention by direct message Wednesday night, noting this tweet from Brian Ries of Mashable:

He elaborated in direct messages Wednesday night after my initial post, which focused more on the San Bernardino Sun’s breaking-news coverage, but reported his doubts:

Later in the original post, you’ll see several journalists who tweeted at Marie, asking for interviews. In most cases, I can’t see any indication that the journalists used anything from Marie, so I think skepticism was widespread, though obviously not universal.

Reported.ly, which specializes in real-time reporting from social media, and produced a social-media timeline of the San Bernardino shooting considered and rejected Marie’s tweet. Reported.ly chief Andy Carvin explained the decision to me in a Facebook message (I add the last names and Twitter profile links of the journalists he referred to by first name):

I just took a look at our chat log; we discussed the tweet in Slack. Kim Bui found it, then noted she hadn’t used it. I suggested we take a close look at the timestamp to see what if anything we could glean from it. Malachy Browne urged caution and noted it was the first time the user had ever mentioned San Bernardino. So we moved on and left her on the cutting room floor.

Monday update: Browne elaborated on Twitter:

Gadi Schwartz of NBC LA reached out to Marie (you’ll see his tweet below), but told me later by DM that the timeline “seemed fishy so i quickly moved on.”

Scott Schwebke of the Orange County Register asked Marie to contact him, but eventually decided not to use anything from her:

Shortly before Marie began gloating about her lie, Seaman, chair of the Society of Professional Journalists Ethics Committee, expressed strong skepticism in a Twitter DM:

Who fell for the story?

While lots of journalists backed away, Marie did successfully troll some of the biggest names in the media, using the names “Marie Christmas,” “Marie Port” and “Marie A. Parker” in various media reports:

CNN

On CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, the host interviewed “Marie Port” by telephone Wednesday night. I have asked CNN spokeswoman Erica Puntel for an explanation of how Cooper and/or his producers vetted Marie before putting her on the air, and will update if I hear from her.

I can’t find a clip of just that segment from Wednesday night on Cooper’s show site and don’t plan to watch the whole episode to catch that interview on an official CNN video. (I suspect CNN will ask YouTube to take the clip below down, so I’ll embed the video, followed by a screengrab):

Marie and her friends commented on Twitter about the interview. I used those tweets in the original post and left them in place if you care to read that far.

Associated Press

When a liar suckers the AP, that means potentially 1,400 newspaper members and thousands of broadcast members might have used the story.

Here’s an archived version of the AP story of “Stories of those who survived mass shooting in California,” which included this sneaky reference to Gamergate:

The woman said he had a strange emblem on his shirt with the letters GG on it.

Friday morning update: AP Vice President and Director of Media Relations emailed me this bulletin, saying it was sent to members about 8 p.m. Thursday:

The current AP story has a correction at the end:

This story has been corrected to eliminate the testimony from Marie A. Parker. That person has publicly retracted the statements.

I would prefer a stronger description than “retracted.” That person (whose name most certainly isn’t Marie A. Parker) is gloating about pulling a hoax on the AP. The correction should note that AP fell for a lie and quoted someone fictitious.

And in that spirit, I should note that Marie gloated about me, too:

New York Times

While most AP members probably didn’t use the story (that’s true of most AP stories; every member selects a minority from a huge budget of news coverage), the New York Times did, and that prompted gloating from Marie and her friends/followers:

I understand the Times story occurs as an automatic feed from AP with no Times handling. The Times story did not carry the correction when I updated this story late Thursday, but it carries the AP correction Friday morning.

Times Standards Editor Phil Corbett emailed me:

As far as I can tell, that story was part of the automated feed of AP (and Reuters) stories that readers can access through nytimes.com. Those stories are not selected or edited by Times editors. Corrections to them, when needed, are handled by the AP.

The Times did write its own story on a hoax involving a possible suspect’s name, but I’m not going into that here.

International Business Times

The International Business Times, quoted “Marie Christmas,” saying she lived in “La Puerta, Calif.” The story didn’t say whether they communicated by phone or Twitter DM. I can’t find any tweets between them. Google Maps shows a couple California businesses in the San Diego area named La Puerta, but not a community by that name. La Puente, Calif., is about 50 miles west of San Bernardino. I’ve asked IB Times contacts for explanation and will update if they respond. At 11:30 p.m. Central time Thursday, the story was not corrected.

Jay Dow

New York TV reporter Jay Dow of WPIX-TV made the best media mea culpa:

What’s left of my original post

Pieces of the original post have been moved up and updated. I don’t unpublish without a good reason, and embarrassment isn’t a good enough one. So here’s what’s left of what I posted Thursday evening shortly before Marie started boasting about the hoax. I will note some updates and add comments on where I am pleased or disappointed with what I originally wrote. But it’s all here, unless I moved it up and updated:

Eyewitnesses who tweet about horrible news events can be important, willing and helpful sources for journalists covering breaking news.

All journalism ethics codes stress accuracy and verification. Coverage of breaking news has always tested journalists’ ability to verify information in a hurry. The 2006 Sago mine disaster in West Virginia, well into the digital age, but at the birth of the social media age we’re experiencing now, resulted in inaccurate front-page banner headlines and late-night broadcasts trumpeting the “miracle rescue” of 12 trapped coal miners. It later turned out that only one miner had survived. The mistaken source in that story was then-West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin.

Unfolding breaking stories today often call on journalists to vet lesser-known sources, such as “Marie Christmas,” whose tweets above offered journalists a chance to connect with an actual eyewitness, while awaiting those official reports (which, as the Manchin case reminds us, can be mistaken).

Breaking news stories have always required journalists to try to connect with eyewitnesses, some of whom want to talk to us and some of whom don’t. Asking them for interviews can be difficult, and sometimes a single witness will attract a media horde. Crude bunch that we can be, journalists (and our sources, too, I suppose) sometimes call this horde a clusterfuck. Which might be a good time to warn you that I’m not cleaning up language for this post. The rest of the F-bombs won’t be coming from me, but mostly references to journalists in the media horde.

When journalists try to verify that people actually witnessed events they have tweeted about, we can be annoying, even insulting. Verification — and media inquiries in general — can be an uncomfortable. Even when we’re doing good journalism we can be intrusive and we have to be skeptical.

Before I was able to ask “Marie Christmas” about what she saw and experienced Wednesday, I mentioned her (though not by @JewyMarie username or the obviously fictitious name on her Twitter account) in a post yesterday about breaking news coverage. (If you don’t want to read or reread the full post, just search “eyewitness” at the link above and you’ll find the section where I mentioned her tweets and why Brian Ries of Mashable raised questions about whether she was an actual witness.) I believe Ries’ concerns were valid and thoughtful, but I won’t elaborate on them again here.

Update: Yeah, this paragraph is embarrassing: After closer examination, I believe “Marie” (she used the last name Port in a CNN interview) actually was an eyewitness, even though I’m not sure we know her true name. I saw the red flags that prompted Ries’ concerns. But I saw many reasons to believe she was a true eyewitness. She had interactions before, during and after the incident that convince me strongly of her legitimacy. This will be a long post, with about 50 screenshots of tweets among Marie and friends, strangers and journalists. Some of the tweets will repeat ground I covered yesterday, but with screenshots this time, rather than just quotes.

I didn’t use screenshots last night because Marie had taken her Twitter account private. I asked to follow her (you can’t read tweets from a private account unless the user accepts you as a follower). She accepted my request and after our discussion by direct message, I have decided to use screenshots of tweets from, to and about her. She has decided to speak publicly about her experience yesterday, and I think her direct messages and Twitter exchanges illustrate some points about breaking news coverage and verification, as well as about the toll journalism can take on sources and how some of the public views our work.

Interspersed with the screenshots will be my comments. I won’t use screenshots that address some personal matters Marie tweeted about before her moment of fame, but those tweets contributed to my belief that she’s legitimate. We’ll start with my direct-message exchange with her:

I normally wouldn’t ask someone that bluntly about verification and whether she was actually there. A phone call would have allowed more gradual and polite vetting, some basic questions about who she was, etc. But since we were communicating by Twitter, I got to the point more directly. I also had already given her a link in which I discussed reasons for skepticism about her specifically. So I got to the point. I think you can detect irritation in the messages below, and I understand and respect that response. If we have more exchanges, I will add them to this post.

She has not DM’d me since, which I understand, but since she had answered questions and had done an earlier interview, I decided to grab screenshots and use her Twitter exchanges.

Clearly, she was right about her birthday. Before her birthday lunch, she got lots of greetings from Twitter friends:

The birthday greetings don’t verify that Marie witnessed the shooting. But they do identify that the person who tweeted about the shooting is a real person with real friends who knew it was her birthday and acted friendly toward her. All of that could describe a prankster. But I’d be more suspicious of someone with a fairly inactive previous Twitter history. Marie is active and lively on Twitter. This looks like someone who would tweet if she saw something terrifying unfold on her birthday.

Plus, the tweets identify lots of friends you could contact for verification. Some might connect you with Marie directly. Some might have been at the birthday gathering and shot their own photos of it. I didn’t try to contact the friends, but would have if I were covering a breaking story. I did check their timelines and didn’t find anyone who had been at the birthday gathering, but also didn’t see anything suspicious. They appeared to share interests and personality traits. One tweeted about hearing Marie on CNN that evening. Update: Trying to contact the friends directly would have certainly raised suspicions. 

Of course, that could be amazement about a friend being on CNN to discuss what she witnessed. Or it could be amazement that a friend pulled off a con. More on the CNN interview later.

As I noted yesterday, Ries saw concerns in Marie’s timeline: (Update: I used this screengrab up higher, but decided to leave it in its original place, too.)

Sarcasm is a frequent tone in Marie’s timeline, and nothing I could see before Wednesday indicated any connection to San Bernardino (as Ries noted in a direct message). And I saw tweets about pranks, though they seemed to be appreciation for pranks by others, not a pattern of playing pranks herself. I saw valid reasons to wonder about the authenticity of Wednesday’s claim. But I have no doubt this is an authentic person’s oft-used Twitter account, even if the name is fictional. Frequent interests of Marie are Anime, video games and the Gamergate sexual-cyberharasssment controversy (in which Roguestar is a figure):

Marie Christmas, media star

I have taught thousands of journalists in recent years to use Twitter to connect with eyewitnesses to breaking news events. My first blog post on the topic was six years ago this month, noting how slow media organizations were in catching up with a survivor who tweeted immediately and extensively about a Denver plane crash. I have used that example in dozens of workshops, seminars and classes.

Back then, watching carefully on Twitter was a certain path to a scoop. Update: In teaching verification techniques, I noted that the survivor’s username, @2drinksbehind, should be a red flag, as Marie’s obviously bogus name was. But his timeline provided more help in verifying his authenticity.

Well, today someone who tweets from the scene of a breaking story gets plenty of media attention, more than I noted in yesterday’s post. Marie received multiple inquiries from some news organizations (it’s not uncommon to have lots of journalists working a story this big and duplication is difficult, if not impossible, to prevent).

I am messaging the journalists cited here in a variety of ways, before and after I post, and will update if they respond.

New York’s Gray Lady and tabloid Daily News both wanted to talk to Marie:

More shortly on John Fairfield and others who objected to journalists seeking interviews with Marie.

This next inquiry came from the Chicago Tribune. Of course journalists should emphasize safety over media contact, as Scott Kleinberg did here:

Update (after initial publication but before the hoax-boasting started): Kleinberg, social media editor for the Chicago Tribune, send this detailed explanation of his Twitter approach to possible eyewitnesses (before the hoax was revealed):

First and foremost, I’m a stickler for accuracy. My tweets about this situation were careful … using official accounts, etc.

Maybe you noticed that I sent an angry tweet with all caps to the general world telling them not to tweet verbatim from the scanner. Ever since Boston it’s been a thing and it drives me mad.

With @JewyMarie, I had a few thoughts at the time. Remember … I’ve been live tweeting in one form or another since 2008-2009 so I’ve learned a thing or 100 along the way. First thing: Never tweet and provide email addresses or phone numbers. That makes you look desperate and I bet it’s what attracted those naysayers.

They say be careful and launch into the contact thing so it seems disingenuous. I was careful to put safety first and let her know that we’d love to talk to her but I didn’t want to put any specifics out there yet.

Right or wrong or helpful, those other journalists don’t realize how much perception matters. So for me I immediately thought of telling her to stay safe … I do that when I ask people to tweet weather photos so I’m all about safety.

I figured that if she responded, then I’d go into the deep verifying and ask her a whole bunch of questions. In the meantime I was looking at her feed and trying to get a sense for who she was. I instantly thought she was young and in high school based on the subject matter, the lack of capital letters and next to zero punctuation. I’d guess a senior in high school as some of the friends wishing her happy birthday had 15 in their Twitter handles, which I believe is their graduating year.

At that moment I just wanted to make the connection. And I wasn’t looking per se to talk to an eyewitness, but I just happened to catch hers and the tone resonated where I wanted to reach out. The people who put in phone numbers and act desperate often send the same tweet to multiple people and that adds to the desperation even more.

Kleinberg did not get a response from Marie, but I like his thoughtful approach. I’m not opposed to tweeting a phone number, but I think he makes a valid point. I know many journalists who’ve gotten great interviews (and been able to vet sources effectively) that way. But perhaps that was more effective before today’s Twitter media horde.

Update: After being informed of the hoax, Kleinberg added:

MSNBC invited a phone call. You can vet a source better and more politely over the phones. Phone numbers may be a your-mileage-might-vary situation:

This next inquiry is from the Daily Beast. (I recommend that journalists reaching out to news eyewitnesses identify themselves in the tweets, rather than counting on the person to check your profile to learn who you are.)

Even a Russian media outlet wanted to talk to Marie:

Multiple responses here. I’m not sure why I haven’t been able to see ABC producer Ali Ehrlich‘s tweet to Marie. More shortly on some of the others, but this string shows the horde Marie was attracting.

As this next tweet indicates, Marie was not going to be easy to interview (clearly a red flag in retrospect, though some journalists, as noted above, backed away in part because of the lack of a phone). The “Buzzfeed Afghanistan” inquiry is clearly a fake, but the media inquiry at the end of this string was legitimate.

Backlash to media inquiries

John Fairfield, mentioned above, was the most consistent scold of journalists seeking interviews with Marie. But he had plenty of company:

Update: Jenna Susko of NBC LA says:

I messaged with her but did not use it.

Fake fake fake

Merry Fyrsmas, included above in a string of legitimate media inquiries, does not appear to be an actual journalist, nor is Fyrasec News, which she cited, an actual news organization (or one you can find on Google, at least). I suspect this is a friend, mocking journalists’ inquiries of Marie.

Update: @Fyrasec confirmed my conclusion:

The inquiry below appears to be a fake, too. Merry Coyote’s link in the Twitter bio is not to a political blog and I could not find such a blog. Might be a friend of Marie’s mocking all the media attention. Or just a stranger joining the clamor.

The question below appears like something an actual journalist might ask, but the inquirer doesn’t identify himself and discloses in his Twitter bio that the “Counterspin Central” blog he once authored is no longer active. Hesiod Thogony, whether a fake or real name for this Twitter user, has its roots in antiquity that I don’t care to read about.

A fake CNN reporter

Though Marie did eventually appear on CNN, this inquiry is a fake. CNN reporters and producers are pretty easy to Google and I can’t find any indication of a CNN employee by that name. Here’s the top of his Twitter page:

And the tweet pinned at the top of his timeline:

And the home page for paultown.com, the link from his Twitter bio:

Nothing there looks like a journalist. Erica Puntel from CNN PR confirmed by email my conclusion that he’s a fake. Will update if I hear from him. (If he follows me back, I’ll DM him questions. If not, I’ll tweet at him when I post this, inviting comment. The blog has no contact information that I can find.)

Update: “Town” followed me back and I’ve added our DM exchange up high. He’s the guy (if he’s male) claiming a “secret cabal” of media trolls.

Actual interviews

Marie later exchanged tweets from an actual CNN reporter:

Update: Hanks would not discuss his interactions with Marie. In fairness it should be noted that he is a CNN digital writer/producer, and I could not find any references to “Marie” on CNN.com. Hanks does not produce for Anderson Cooper 360, the CNN show where Cooper interviewed “Marie Port” by telephone Wednesday night, as I noted earlier in the updated post.

The reaction to the Cooper interview seems to indicate friends regarded it as legit. In retrospect, some, if not all, were clearly in on the hoax:

Marie and her friends wound down the evening with light banter.

She summed the day up:

I think if she would have gotten in touch with me on deadline, I could have verified pretty quickly that Marie was a valid eyewitness and tried to use and verify her real given name. I wouldn’t have used her tweets in a breaking story without talking to her, though. Update: I’m glad I originally said that I wouldn’t use the tweets without talking to her. And, given the fact that she was lying, I’m certain I would have been able to determine that if we had ever talked on the phone.

I feel comfortable using them here because of our Twitter exchange and the context I am providing. The work I spent on this blog post was way more than you can spend on one source in most breaking news stories.

Here were my last DMs to her (I have not heard back, but will try again and update if I do).

I’ll update with responses, if any, from Marie and journalists I have messaged (and will continue messaging; sometimes sending the link to a published post brings a response).

Post script

As I’ve noted in earlier posts about identifying mass killers, I don’t like indulging attention-seekers, and these trolls clearly relish attention, even if for their fake names. So it sickens me to feed that disgusting behavior with this much attention. But journalists covering breaking news should learn from our mistakes. I made mistakes in my initial analysis of this episode, and other journalists made bigger mistakes. So I wrote this long, long updated analysis in hopes of making it harder for trolls to exploit tragedy, and journalists’ challenges in covering unfolding breaking news.

I suggest reading my social media verification tips (I may need to reread them myself, and update). I also suggest reading the Verification Handbook. In my chapter of that book, I used (and explained the history of) one of journalism’s favorite clichés: If your mother tells you she loves you check it out. And if someone with a phony-sounding name tells you anything, double-check and triple-check it out. Or move on to a more credible source.

One final point: This hoax was clearly rooted in Twitter, and social media have given liars and pranksters new tools. But media hoaxes way predate social media. Journalists have been interviewing teen-age boys named “Heywood Jablome” (say it out loud; the kids always spell it for the gullible reporters) for decades.

Friday evening postscript

If you’ve made it this far, you might find the comments from trolls below interesting. Fascinating patterns: Moral indignation about failings (some of them valid, obviously) by the media but completely clueless about how cowardly they appear hiding behind bogus names and how completely lacking they are in integrity, as they trumpet lying as a perverted tool of digital vigilantism. I responded to a few, because I respond to almost all commenters here, but I’m going to stop. I generally delete comments from trolls, because they are so clearly seeking attention and I don’t like to indulge attention-seekers. But they seem appropriate here, showing the psychology of the lying troll better than I could describe it.

Update: Of course, I spoke too soon. Right after I posted the paragraph above, a troll lied in a comment, so I deleted it. You can defend lying here, but I won’t tolerate new lies. Find somewhere else to troll. And another update: No sooner did I post that last update than the same troll posted another long diatribe with more lies. I’ve deleted his/her entire thread, including my responses. This was the most active troll in the comments, but I think enough others remain to illustrate the points I’ve made above.

One of journalism’s oldest clichés is that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.

I had the desired initial reaction to the letter above, rejecting Albert Einstein for an associate professor position: I thought how cool it was that some pompous science professor with a Ph.D. after his name had been so condescendingly dismissive of the greatest modern scientific thinker.

And it was about when I was reading the last line, about Einstein’s thinking being artistic, rather than really about physics, that I wondered whether a Swiss professor would really be writing a German colleague in English. Snopes quickly provided the answer: No.

I’m not going to bother to embarrass the colleague who posted this on social media by naming him. He clearly has enough company that Snopes felt the need to check out the letter’s authenticity.

I recommend reading the debunking by Dan Evon. It’s a nice illustration of the various paths to verification you can use in any story. He found that the hoax was based on an actual fact: The University of Bern did reject Einstein’s initial application for a doctorate in 1907. But everything else was phony: the professor’s name and title, the letterhead, the language, even the image of a modern Einstein stamp.

You can repost interesting stuff like this on social media without checking if you want. And I’m not going to claim that I thoroughly vet every fun thing I’ve posted on social media. But social media, even personal accounts, are also good places for journalists to practice the skepticism that is the core of good journalism.

Especially if something seems too good to be true.