Customer Reviews

The Fact Checker's Bible

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Fittingly, the descriptions of THE FACT CHECKER'S BIBLE given in the blurbs above exactly match Sarah Harrison Smith's book. Despite an enviable résumé, something in Smith's tone suggests youthful excitement---inasmuch as she still finds it exciting to track down the ten thousand details that a writer has already dug up in order to ensure that she or he has got them all right. (In literary studies, those people are called critics and biographers.) But considering the number of scandals concerning plagiarism, fabrication, and sheer audacity in American journalism during recent years, this demanding task is a necessary one---even though it is surrounded by so many legal pitfalls that it sounds like Hell, Inc.
(Her chapter on fact-checking poetry and fiction comes off as a little comic, albeit unintentionally, and suggests it is likely that she writes neither: when creating imaginative literature, accuracy is swell but plausibility is paramount.)
Far from being addressed only to colleagues in the profession, this brisk handbook will educate anyone who writes anything, and readers who wish to become better judges of everything they read---in the news, in their own area of expertise, or for pleasure. Smith maintains the fine line where skepticism does not sour into cynicism, and makes better critics of us all.

I needed to learn the basics of fact-checking rather quickly, and Smith's book taught me everything I needed to know. A must-read for anyone in media or publishing.

[...] If someone knew nothing about the publication the author worked for, the New Yorker or the others she discussed, like the NYT, the book would seem to be informative.

In reality the book itself is [...]. It would be like a book on safety published by the former manager of the Chernobyl Power plant.

If you want to get quickly to the heart of the deception(and get a good laugh); skip to the back of the book and read the parts about fact checking for TV news programs.

If you have made a serious effort to study and research the truth, the facts about current events and contemporary political debate; then you know that the New Yorker constantly lies and deceives its readers. It is little more that a trade publication for the New York left.

To put it another way.; A lawyer pleads with a Judge to be lenient with his client who has just been convicted of a double homicide, on the basis that his client is an orphan.

The authors idea of fact checking is to confirm the fact, by proper research into government records, that indeed both of the defendants parents are dead.

The fact that the reason they are dead is that the defendant, their son, murdered them is conveniently overlooked.