Washington Post Learns The Importance Of Fact Checking… And Reading The Comments

When you don’t buy the paper you get better news coverage. The online reader comments always have the real story. It’s not the reporters fault. They are in a hurry, don’t really know what’s going on and the editor will slam them for anything he/she doesn’t like. We rely on the reader comments to tell us what’s really happening. As for corrections in a newspaper, don’t hold your breath.

It’s the same in Charlottetown PEI as it is in Washington DC.

By Mike Masnick, from Techdirt

On November 26th (Thanksgiving), the Washington Post put up an article about the group Public Enemy and its efforts to help the homeless in DC. Nice enough. However, there was one oddity in the article. It claimed that the band’s famous song 911 is a Joke was about the attacks of September 11th.

Yes, this is a song that was released in 1990. And if you’ve ever heard it, you know that it’s about the phone number you call for emergencies. I mean the first line of the song is “I dialed 911 a long time ago….”.

Now, I guess this is a mistake that anyone could make if they were totally unfamiliar with Public Enemy or its music — but you would think that someone writing an article about the band would at least learn a little about the music it released. Furthermore, we’re constantly told about how the mainstream press is important because they have fact checkers. Apparently, they took Thanksgiving off.

But, a bigger point is brought forth by Mathew Ingram who points out that people in the comments of the article pointed out the mistake really quickly and it took an entire week for the Washington Post to get around to making a correction.

Now, everyone makes mistakes now and again, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but it does demonstrate a few things. Just claiming you have fact checkers doesn’t make you significantly more accurate at times. Separately, we’ve pointed out in the past how bad newspapers seem to be with actually engaging with commenters on their site, and this highlights why they’re making a big mistake. Yes, it’s work. Yes, sometimes there can be a lot of junk in the comments, but you can also learn a lot — such as when you’ve made a huge mistake.