An issue here which fascinates me is -- how closely do we expect any subjective narrative to match the facts?
I'd love to see an experiment where you ask ten people to drive a car for 300 miles and write a story about how their trip went; then compare what they wrote against actual instrumentation data. I would be fascinated to know what parts of their narrative are most likely to be incorrect / misreported.
This isn't just one of "ten people"; it's a nytimes columnist whose very profession is to report facts, accurately. He got caught embellishing facts for a pre-determined narrative, simple as that. I can't believe people are actually trying to defend this sloppy journalism.
Hmm, I may be a little more cynical than you here.
To my eye practically all journalists are sloppy: when I read a newspaper article about a topic I know well, it no longer comes as any kind of surprise to read something inaccurate or incomplete.
I can maybe trust the facts in a New Yorker piece (their editors' attention to detail is legendary) or in a WSJ feature article, where someone has had a lot of time to put things together and probably knows 10 times more than they bothered to write down … but that's not how most news works. Most newspaper stories are a "first draft of history" and I'm pretty much prepared to accept that when I read a story, it is one person's interpretation of what happened that is likely to deviate from reality in some hopefully minor way.
I'd like to understand whether I'm being unduly cynical or whether this is really a common quirk in how people tell stories -- hence my suggestion that I'd love to see an experiment where we measure empirically how good people are at aligning their story with easily measured facts.
You're probably right to be cynical, but the issue is that most people are not. I would be that the vast majority of people who read an NYTimes article take it as gospel, which is scary.
But it's a shame that we're expected to distrust journalists working for a reputable newspaper.
Journalists get special legal protections; newspapers get special legal protections (at least, in the UK they do) and asking them to tell the truth doesn't seem too onerous.
Telling the truth is a professional ethical obligation for journalists, and it should be a personal ethical code for most people, and it's just weird to me that we should be asking it of journalists.
(And I'm in the UK where we have scum writing for news papers.)
I don't think that matters. It is well established that just asking people to recount an event is extremely unreliable. However, the difference between "ask ten people" and "have a journalist write an article for a major newspaper" makes this question a lot less fascinating.
Things maybe relative or fuzzy, but journalism is supposed to be one of these areas where the two are explicitly ruled out.
I'd love to see an experiment where you ask ten people to drive a car for 300 miles and write a story about how their trip went; then compare what they wrote against actual instrumentation data. I would be fascinated to know what parts of their narrative are most likely to be incorrect / misreported.