What is it about?

We interviewed Canadian journalists about how they checked for accuracy in their work. We found they vary considerably in their standards for what counts as accurate, what kinds of facts need to be checked, and how much checking needs to be done before a fact can be assumed to be accurate. Proper names, numbers and some other concrete details were consistently verified with greatest care, but we found few other universal areas of agreement.

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Why is it important?

Many journalists agree that they are truth-tellers by definition. It has been said that "the essence of journalism is a discipline of verification." (Kovach and Rosenstiel, 2007). But we didn't manage to find a professional "discipline," in this regard: at best, we identified a few informal and somewhat elusive rules of practice and a strong tendency toward pragmatic compromises.

Perspectives

In a later work, my colleagues and I went back into our interview transcripts with the journalists and found a rich vein of imaginative discourse in which journalists tended to suggest (amongst other things) that verification was something done for professionally defensive reasons, ignorer to see things more clearly, and as part of a quest for truth through storytelling that combines the instruments of fact with the craft of fiction. (Shapiro, Brin, Spoel and Marshall, 2016)

Prof Ivor Shapiro
Ryerson University

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This page is a summary of: Verification as a Strategic Ritual, Journalism Practice, December 2013, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/17512786.2013.765638.
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