Wired Amends Stories With Fabricated Quotes

SiliconEntity writes "Wired Online has been forced to correct dozens of stories in the wake of disclosures that reporter Michelle Delio may have fabricated quotes. Wired has published over 700 stories by Delio since 2000, and in a review of 160 of the most recent ones, 24 were found to have quotes that could not be confirmed. Several of the Wired stories being questioned were discussed on Slashdot, including Spyware on My Machine? So What?, Minniapple's Mini Radio Stations, The Masters of Memory Lane, and probably many more. Wired is not the only one to get burned; MIT Technology Review and InfoWorld have also had to retract or alter stories written by Delio." Update: 05/10 19:20 GMT by Z : Altered to clarify Wired's actions.

Comments

Who Should Retract What?

[BandwidthHog]

From TFA:

<blink>Wired News is not retracting any of these stories.</blink> Rather, we are appending notes to the stories, indicating what we have been unable to confirm about them and editing them, as noted, where appropriate. By keeping these stories posted and clearly marked, we hope that our readers can help identify any sources whom we cannot track down.

Re:Who Should Retract What?

[badasscat]

This is because none of the sources were proven to be made up.

It's impossible (or at least very difficult) to prove a negative. You would literally have to go through the entire population of the planet to prove that these people didn't exist, and check death records over the past several years for every country on earth. If she's quoting someone, and her answer when somebody asks about them is "well, they were a friend of a friend, I don't know where they're from" (as she did say about several of these people), that's almost impossible to disprove.

It would be naive, though, to think that she didn't make these people up. There's a disturbing pattern here; this is not a few isolated cases, and it's interesting that she can provide contact info for some sources easily but cannot verify others at all (including some she supposedly contacted the very week this investigation was going on). If you read through the actual report, she did, for example, provide a source list for everyone but the sources that couldn't be found by others, and the few bits of info she did provide for these sources turned out to be fake (of course, she made up some new excuses for why the email addresses and phone numbers didn't work). So she was actively trying to cover for herself; this was not all just a big coincidence.

(As a side note, I have read entire articles on Wired that turned out to be fake for one reason or another, the most obvious examples being the "Toothing" article and the article about iPods on the Microsoft campus [which was filled with quotes from anonymous sources and was refuted pretty strongly by Microsoft employees after it ran]. Wired Online has some serious credibility problems right now, and the only reason nobody seems to much care is that the expectations of them seem to be so low to begin with.)

I say, if you're a news organization and you can't verify the source of a quote, you treat it as a fake source and you in turn treat the entire article as suspect. These articles should all be pulled and her career should be over. She should get no "second" chance - her second chance was the first article she wrote after her first made-up source. She continued to make up sources for subsequent articles, so she has more than used up her "second" chances if you ask me.

Re:Whew!

[Otter]

In fact, according to the linked Wired article:

Wired News is not retracting any of these stories. Rather, we are appending notes to the stories, indicating what we have been unable to confirm about them and editing them, as noted, where appropriate. By keeping these stories posted and clearly marked, we hope that our readers can help identify any sources whom we cannot track down.

Maybe Slashdot will issue a retraction?!?

Re:New job

[Bonker]

It should be noted that Ms. Delio is not being accused of wholesale fabrication as a certain writer for the NYT was found out having done.

What has apparently happened is an accountability problem. She's taken too much second-hand information and reported it as first hand in a double handful of articles. A journalism prof and several grad students were able to confirm the vast majority of her quotes and attributions.

This amounts to sloppiness, carelessness and unprofesionalism rather than blatant deception or malicious intent.

It'll probably still end her writing career, however.

Tempest in a teapot

[jaymzter]

Before your knees starts jerking...

If you RTFA, you'll learn that of 700 articles, only about 24 had citation issues, and of those, only FOUR were articles that relied on unconfirmed quotes. The woman didn't cite her sources correctly, that's all this is.

Re:Random audits

[The Barking Dog]

When I was interviewed by Wired (published May 2003, page 43; it's not worth looking up though, trust me), an editor contacted me for follow-up a few days after the freelancer who wrote the article to double-check that I was who I said I was and that I said the things that they were going to publish. Maybe they've become more lax in the two years since then, or maybe this reported falsified the contact information for the sources.

Record EVERYTHING!

[GQuon]

n'th rule of interviews: Record everything you say to a reporter! Some states allow you to record without informing the reporter. To be on the safe side, if you don't know the laws of your state, ask the reporter if it's OK. If (s)he says "no", why the smeg are you still giving an interview?

(I thought of this myself, but I have later found it verified in information pamphlets on dealing with the media.)

n+1'th rule: Everything is on the record. Even if the camera appears to be turned off, the tally (the red blinking light) isn't on or whatever.

My own rule: Bloggers are your best friend if a journalist c**** on you. "Crockumentary" filmmaking and reporting, while still financially viable, isn't as damaging to the "public record" as it used to be. The people who want to believe the a**-journalist will still do it, but other people will know better.

Not quite

[PCM2]

Actually, if you read Penenberg's report, he only looked at a sample of 160 of Delio's articles. Of those, 24 had sources Penenberg's team could not confirm. I don't know where you get your four number.

I was the editor of the "Enterprise Blogs and Wikis" story for InfoWorld that Penenberg talks about in his report and I can confirm that Ms. Delio similarly did not respond to requests that she identify the partial sources she cited in that article. Other editors at InfoWorld followed up on sources in other stories independently and were unable to confirm those sources.

Tempest in a teapot? Maybe. To tell the truth, if there were fabricated quotes in the articles Ms. Delio wrote for me, I really don't think they did a whole lot of damage to the stories themselves. Barring the unconfirmed sources I mentioned, I do believe that her articles were meant to be factual stories written in good faith. That's why InfoWorld, like Wired, has not actually retracted any of Ms. Delio's stories; in some cases we have excised certain portions of those stories from the online versions, but all of the stories are still available (though it's only about four stories total for us, if I remember right).

That's kind of the shame of this whole thing, too. It doesn't give me any joy to see Ms. Delio dragged out in front of the court of public opinion for what may have been nothing more than a pattern of very poor judgment. But anytime a writer may have fabricated something in an otherwise ostensibly factual story, that's the kind of tempest in a teapot you want your media sources to jump all over. You just can't let it slide.

InfoWorld won't be able to use Ms. Delio's services anymore, but for myself I wish her the best of luck and hope she can move on from this episode in a way that is satisfying for her both personally and professionally. (Note that these statements are my own and do not represent the official opinion of InfoWorld magazine or its parent company, IDG.)

other instances of journalistic fraud

[ChrisCampbell47]

This is a topic that I've personally followed very closely for over decade. If anyone out there is interest in the issues and events surrounding fraud and ethics in journalism, let me point out two sources:

Book: Hard News : The Scandals at The New York Times and Their Meaning for American Media, by Seth Mnookin
Beyond the obvious fraud commited by Jayson Blair, Mnookin delves into what was wrong in the NYT newsroom and managerial organization that allowed Blair to get away with it. In short: an imperious Howell Raines alienated his subordinate editors and the communications process broken down, allowing a "charismatic crook" to slip past the checks and balances that normally would catch him.

Movie: Shattered Glass, starring *cough* Hayden Christensen
At the New Republic, Stephen Glass was able to subvert their fact checking process -- starting with occasionally making up quotes, he ended up fabricating entire stories out of whole cloth. The Forbes Digital investigation that finally brought him down will likely be interesting to readers here ...

I'm purposely not reading the comments on this thread, because the naivety exhibited will certainly make my head spin, and I need to get back to work. In short, just like the typical Slashdot reader knows a hell of a lot more about the subtleties of IT than a journalist, the journalism professional knows a hell of a lot more about the subtleties of journalism ethics than 99% of Slashdot readers.

And above all, spend a little time reading "hard" journalism once in while (even online versions of the old media, like NYT, WP, etc.) and get a feel for what rigorous journalism looks like. Blogs have their own set of problems that you may be blind to if you never read "real" reporting ...