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It’s a fact - Brits don’t check

There are many things to admire about the British press, believes Maury, an American, but accuracy isn't one of them. She writes that, "American fact checking likes to believe it's robust, and in truth, it usually is. We assume that our government is also stringent about its facts, and until the Bush Administration, it was. (This is, I believe, part of the reason why our papers initially believed George Bush's statements about WMDs.) What robust fact checking means is that as a journalist I have to tape every interview and turn in transcripts to my editors along with the finished pieces. I also double-check facts from newspapers and magazines. I used to believe this was the standard for all reliable press in the Western world." But not so - Laurel investigated a story about a Muslim British beauty Queen and reports: "While British readers read about a poor, persecuted Muslim girl who'd been a refugee from the Taliban, who's family was so poor that her mother had to make her pageant dress, I found a middle-class Muslim girl whose parents had been university professors. She loved wearing pink and wanted to study advertising. I spoke with the head of fact checking at a national magazine here in America. He sighed and said that the British press was notorious for bad fact checking. His attitude was "live and learn", meaning don't even pitch a piece based on facts in the British press without checking them yourself."

British Journalism Review, Vol. 18, No. 1, 39-44 (2007)
DOI: 10.1177/0956474807077788


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