Boston Globe
Alex Beam
SEEING THE ERRORS OF MY WAYS
By Alex Beam, Globe Staff | Thursday, September 30, 2004
Irony lives. My first job in journalism was as a fact-checker.
I worked at Newsweek International for 20 months in the late 1970s. It was a rude introduction to the distinction between accuracy and truth. I remember "fact-checking" a cover story on the French elections that an editor had deemed ideologically impure, i.e., not antisocialist enough. So the writer grabbed the previous week's Time magazine - always "sound," politically - and ran portions of it though his typewriter. The fact-checking was easy, because Time had legendarily high standards for accuracy, admixed with a reputation for right-wing flummery.
What we published was completely accurate - and a rehashed pile of bunk.
So how could I not warm to the appearance of the slim volume "The Fact Checker's Bible," by Sarah Harrison Smith? A former New Yorker fact-checker, Smith has written a how-to manual on not making mistakes, or at least avoiding the more flagrant ones.
The New Yorker had legendarily high standards for accuracy until it was revealed in 1984 that Alistair Reid had fabricated portions of his dispatches from Spain, and, more recently, that a young contributor had played loosely with facts in an article called "My Fake Job."
It's out of fashion to joke about journalistic accuracy, since Barnicle, Blair, Rather & Co. have besmirched the profession. It's certainly not a laughing matter at Ms. Smith's current employer, The New York Times Co., which we at the Globe call our "daddy." With great solemnity, the Times' Corrections box informs its readers each day that Ukraine's prime minister is "Viktor F. Yanukovich, not A.," or that Caroline Smith DeWaal would prefer not to be called Caroline S. DeWaal; "she uses the surnames together."
Maybe this is the time for me to apologize to Jon Strymish of the New England Mobile Book Fair for spelling his name "John" a few years ago. And to the Mount Washington Hotel for calling its exterior white clapboard, when it is in fact white stucco. I've been to the hotel twice, but as fact-checkers would say, memory is not a "red-check" - i.e. completely reliable - source. "Too-good memory" is Smith's wry characterization of writers' ability to recall "facts."
I've never set out to write anything untrue; sometimes it just turned out that way. Isn't that what career criminal always say? Not so long ago, I got Franklin D. Roosevelt's birthdate wrong and confused the aircraft carrier Constellation with the USS Constitution, "Old Ironsides." I apologized. I made Internet history when Michael Kinsley published what he claimed was the first online correction in 1996, noting that I had confused the 49th with the 38th parallel in a Slate magazine article about Canada. (Or something like that. The correction has since vanished into pixellated oblivion. Right on! A statute of limitations for errors.)
The stupidest mistake I ever made was writing a long column item about Mayor Menino successfully packing a Boston Public Library board in 1995. It was a great story, and in the main true(!), but one of the key players was William O. Taylor, then-chairman of the Globe Newspaper Company. After the piece appeared, Taylor invited me to his office and dictated what I (half) jokingly call the world's longest newspaper correction. I haven't written much about the BPL since.
If Smith has indeed written an accuracy Bible, then I committed a mortal sin this April when I described former baseball commissioner Fay Vincent as the "late" Fay Vincent. I phoned him the next day and apologized profusely. He was very courteous and seemed to forgive me.
I later immortalized the moment in a parodied verse of the old folkie standby, "Joe Hill," which I sang onto a colleague's answering machine:
I dreamed I saw Fay V last night
Alive as you or me I said, `But Faye, I read you're dead'
`I never died,' said he.
`I never died,' said he.
If you can't make fun of your own shortcomings, what can you make fun of?
Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com.