More Thoughts on Publishing, and Fact Checking (UPDATE)

Since my post below about book-publisher snobbery attracted some comments, let me send you over to some related thoughts at American Digest. There, Gerard Vanderleun says that in modern book publishing--especially when it comes to books by big names like Jimmy Carter--fact checking is more or less dead. A financial incentive exists to look the other ways as big names tell whoppers. Libel checking exists, but what most books go through is less rigorous than what magazines do--which ain't much. But guess which magazine he worked at had the tightest standards?

The most passionate magazine about fact-checking I ever worked for was Penthouse. We always had any number of lawsuits cooking no matter how hard the articles were vetted nor how rigorously the facts were checked. We were seldom beaten in any of the lawsuits precisely because our fact-checking was so draconian, but that didn't stop people from trying. Having an insane publisher who believed in magic cancer cures, aliens from outer space, and that female urination was a turn on didn't make our burden any lighter.

Indeed, since we did spend so much time fact-checking and getting things right, one of the favorite morning coffee pass times was reading the always amusing crow-eating corrections in the New York Times or running a few obvious boners from The New Yorker through Lexis/Nexis to see just how stupid the "legendary fact-checkers" had become since the death of Mr. Shawn. The Tina Brown years were especially rich, but I have no doubt the current regime with its endless touting of Seymour Hersh's tainted and unsourced revelations has pretty much put paid to the "fact checkers." It is hard to check the "facts" supplied by unnamed and fanciful sources. Besides, the US government and the Pentagon are as unlikely to sue the New Yorker for libel as Israel is to sue Carter, so what's the worry?

UPDATE: More thoughts from someone inside the biz.