“Shattered Glass:” Picking up the broken pieces of fact-checking failure

The paramount virtue of all journalists can be summarized in one word: accuracy.

Without verification, accuracy is not possible. And without accuracy, public trust factor goes out the window.

“(The) single most frequently and clearly stated value expressed in journalists’ self-identification is a drive for accuracy,” authors Ivor Shapiro et al. said in their 2013 study “Verification as a Strategic Ritual.”

In the media industry — especially in community journalism — developing trust and reliability with sources and readers is essential to success as a reporter.

For as prominently as journalists view the drive for attaining accuracy, several factors point to a need for a deeper commitment.

According to a Pew Research Center study conducted in August, 61% of Americans expect the news to be accurate, while at the same time, 55% believe that careless reporting is the cause for the large numbers of people skeptical of the media today.

The Pew study went on to report that large numbers of Americans (63%) actually believe that ideally audiences should skeptical rather than trusting of the media.

Numbers like those speak to the devastating effects that the recent era of “fake news” brought to the media industry. People already don’t trust news sources, and now they don’t even think that they should, even if the media were to become more trustworthy in the future.

That’s a problem for aspiring future journalists, such as myself. And honestly, the media has no one to blame but themselves.

Later in their study, Shapiro et al. sited a 2008 British study which found that 87% of the newspaper and broadcast stories researched were based solely on a single primary source.

The stringent verification of information proclaimed as a pillar of journalism has failed to become a ritual of practice.

Whether it’s due to the strict deadlines of news organizations, the insatiable desire to be first to report a story or just plain laziness and lack of attention to detail, it’s hard to take the media industry at its word when such a decline in verification proliferates.

An intriguing anecdotal example to the issue of fact-checking failure uncovered by the British study can be seen in the movie “Shattered Glass,” a dramatized historical film about the real-life story of former New Republic reporter Stephon Glass.

In the movie, Glass is a young up-and-coming journalist known for writing attention-grabbing articles for the large magazine. One of the scenes in the movie displays a prime example of in-depth fact checking at its peak.

In the scene, Glass described the process of editing that each story goes through before publication in the magazine. The process is extensive, with the copy bouncing back and forth between reporter, copy editors and section editors and intense attention to detail, including the referencing of every single assertion made in the story.

Astonishingly, as the movie develops, the audience sees the deviant ways in which Glass circumvented the process and published multiple articles with either partial or completely fantasized information.

Glass’ duping of such a prominent journalistic publication like the New Republic serves as a critical example of just how important good editing, and especially verification is when telling a story.

As Glass explains in the editing process scene, at that time (late 1990’s), stories that focused on primary sources without much verifiable information would be fact-checked using the reporter’s own notes. Such a method granted a lot of trust to reporters as they diligently took notes and recorded information during the research and investigation.

However, in today’s media industry, as pointed out by the British study, single-source stories without verifiable secondary-source information leave too much room for failure.

Looking at this issue from a community journalism perspective, accuracy and verification matter just as significantly as they do at national media outlets like the New Republic.

In the book, “Community Journalism: Relentlessly Local,” one of the key themes author Jack Lauterer focuses on is the necessity for trust to be built between journalists and the communities they serve.

For me personally, as an aspiring local sports reporter, I enjoyed reading Lauterer’s ideas about the need for accuracy in order to build trust in a community sports journalism setting.

According to Lauterer, achieving accuracy in local sports journalism begins with building relationships. Getting to know the coaches, athletic directors and student athletes in an area allows a reporter to develop trust and can lead to sources that provide helpful information for story ideas and are willing to take a call and confirm information when fact-checking a story.

Ultimately, Lauterer’s thoughts are simple: building relationships leads to access to information and access to information leads to accurate and intriguing reporter that local communities desire.

“The equation Access + Rapport = Success is particularly true in the area of sports coverage,” Lauterer said in the book.

I am one of the many journalists that would agree with those studied by Shapiro et al. that “journalism is a discipline of verification.” I enjoy thoroughly raking through the sports stories I edit at the Liberty Champion, checking for everything from correct spelling of names to accurate statistical information.

At the same time, I am a human being, and on occasion I miss things.

I think the last important note to make about the idea of accuracy, verification and trust factor, is that journalists need to be more willing to be told that they are wrong. As a reporter I know that I am going to make mistakes ­– maybe a misquote, an inaccurate assertion made or an incorrect job title — but I am willing to admit I was wrong and move forward.

Journalism is not a craft of perfection, but it does require patience and accuracy, and those are two virtues I am willing to be held to.