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Talked to a retired news editor about how they used to fact-check stories
I ran into this guy at a coffee shop downtown who spent 40 years at a paper. He said they'd call every single source listed in an article and verify quotes before publishing. Now I see outlets running with a single tweet as the whole story, no follow-up. Has anyone else noticed how many major stories this year had zero follow-up reporting after the initial blast?
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theajohnson3mo ago
Old man yells at cloud, but like... he had a point. Now we're out here fact-checking with a single tweet and vibes.
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grace_knight193mo ago
My neighbor used to work at a local paper years back and said they had a whole department just for checking the weather reports. Like they'd call the weather service and cross reference with like three other sources before running a story about a storm. Now I see a news alert pop up about a tornado warning and it's just some random person's video of a cloudy sky. Makes you wonder how many alarms we're setting off for nothing.
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spencer_gonzalez13mo ago
...and now I'm the guy who fact-checks my own group texts before hitting send because one time I accidentally forwarded a fake gas shortage alert to my whole family. @grace_knight19 that's such a good point about the weather stuff, I live in a place where every random cloud gets called a "once in a century storm" on the news. I miss when reporters actually had to pick up a phone instead of just refreshing Twitter for the next headline to copy-paste.
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