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

Hmmm...

[It doesn't come easy]

Any relation to Maureen O'Gara?

Re:Hmmm...

[spiderworm]

Any relation to Maureen O'Gara?

Not likely. Did you see the picture of Maureen? I don't think that procreation happens in that family very often.

Re:Hmmm...

[dgatwood]

So I have to ask... "What's the Delio?"

:-D

New job

[wiredlogic]

So will Delio's new job be reporting for the New York Times or a Slashdot editor?

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.

Random audits

[winkydink]

While it would be difficult to check every source for every story, not checking them leads less-than-scrupulous journalists into temptation. Why not have a publication select a number of sources at random and check them? Wouldn't this go a long way towards "keeping honest people honest"?

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.

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:Pic

[Anonymous Coward]

How did you get a picture of a Harbor seal wearing lipstick?

...and I quote!

[Anonymous Coward]

In a recent news conference, Michelle Delio stated, "I have no familial relation to Maureen O'Gara, but the similarities are striking."

Not to worry

[ackthpt]

They've got a few experienced journalists lined up to take her place.

• Janet Cooke
• Stephen Glass
• Jayson Blair
• Jack Kelley
• Jeff Gannon
• Maureen O'Gara

"I swear I am not making this up" -- Dave Barry

Personally, I don't talk to reporters anymore. For years I have been disgusted by "fill-in-the-blanks-with-whatever-sounds-good" journalists.

As a teenager I was featured in the local town paper with my father's OSI (that's Ohio Scientific) computer, which I was learning to program in the mid 70's. I was aghast to read the article, with my face prominently displayed above it at the dining room table near the computer, filled in with all sorts of wild claims. Seemed to me that reality wasn't exciting enough for the reporter so she threw in some crap about my teenage brother writing for Scientific American (she screwed up the name Ohio Scientific, which my brother had written a program for.)

Year's later I'd be misquoted, embarrassingly so, during the outsourcing of my department. A decidedly pro-labor, and damn whatever he said, article put words in my mouth and I'll never forgive that paper for that. The next time they called I hung up. I don't talk to reporters anymore.

That is stange

[TedTschopp]

I've been interviewed for a Wired Story, and the interviewers/Writers editor called us up to fact check, and quote check. I wonder why this didn't happen here?

Strange...

Ted Tschopp

Re:Whew!

[Jason Earl]

Slashdot, and other similar sites, are a little different because the whole point is to foster discussion. if someone invents a quote on the spot, or chooses a headline that doesn't fit the story, or whatever there are plenty of people that are willing to point that out. That's the point of Slashdot, it's more of a forum for discussion, than a news source (although once you get enough comments it becomes easy to do a little research and make your own informed decisions).

Michelle, on the other hand, was supposed to be reporting "news." It's often just as biased, but it's supposed to at least be verifiable. You might not agree with the conclusion, but not the facts that were presented. Heck, even on Slashdot the editors don't just make stuff up so that it fits their story.

Seems valid to me, at least somewhat...

[garcia]

When you write such riveting articles with titles like "Read The F***ing Story, Then RTFM" we know that you must be a gem of a freelancer! I wouldn't know for sure though, I couldn't RTFS or the FM. I'm a Slashdotter afterall.

What I found funny about the quotes given by "Carmella" is that they were mirrored on several other sites with the citation leading back to the Wired article.

From this article entitled "Spyware on My Machine? So What?":

I had a good idea what the Marketscore software does, though I didn't read the entire user agreement," said 19-year-old New York University student Keith Caron. "In general when any application asks to install another application, I assume the other application is spyware. But you have to support spyware if you're going to have free file-sharing applications. Fair's fair.

I had a good idea what Delio was doing when she wrote these articles, though I didn't read the entire thing," said 26-year-old Slashdotter Bill Roehl. "In general when any story is posted to the main page, I assume it's full of worthless bullshit that no one cares about. But you have to support Slashdot if you're going to be a Slashbotter. Fair's fair in addiction."

I know that I was asked many times to answer simple questions on campus. I usually would give some valid reply and list a fake name and address. They can have my thoughts but why would I ever give them my personal information.

"Keith" seems like a typical college student from 2004, IMHO, most of them don't give a shit as long as they can get their music free and fast.

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:Pic

[Anonymous Coward]

How did you get a picture of a Harbor seal wearing lipstick?

Rub lipstick on a herring, and feed it to the seal. What's really tough it getting it to rest its chin on its flipper.

What the Delio! :-)

[Quiet_Desperation]

"We really should have realized something was amiss when she mentioned that a spyware program found her lost cat," said senior Wired editor Brank McTonnahay. "The problem is, you see, is that I and the other senior editors have severe addictions to cocaine and heroin. It's a full time job just keeping the monkey away. Sally over in the PC department is also a total crack whore."

"It's lies! Lies I tell you!" said Ms. Delio, shaking her fist at a press conference held the women's rest room at an abandone Gulf Oil station off the New Jersey Turnpike. "Wait... I mean, the claims that I told lies are lies, you see? My words were unvarnished truth! The Walker Art Museum really did transform into a giant Autobot and prance around the area. There were, like BILLIONS of witnesses!"

"She's (sniff) a troubled (sniff) girl," said and shaky, sweaty Rebekah Chemtrayle who is some sort of senior something at Wired that no one is quite able to define. "(Sniff) she has had some traumatic (sniff) experiences (sniff) and some (sniff) childhood demons (sniff) that causes her to (sniff) do really unsound things (sniff) like write false (sniff) stories, wear poly(sniff)ester and vote (sniff) Republican... fuck, I need a fix. How much would youy (sniff) pay me for (sniff) a BBBJ?"

"They won't catch me!" cried Ms. Delio in a phone interview from what she claimed was her Fortress Of Solitude in Flat Rock, Michigan deep beneath the Ford Mustang plant. "I'll unleash my legions of lesbian ninja kittens on tham all, and I, yes *I* shall have the last laugh. Here it goes. Hahahahahahaaa!"

Holy Prolific Journalism Batman!

[mapmaker]

Wired has published over 700 stories by Delio since 2000

That's more than a story every three days, including weekends, for over 5 years. And that's just for Wired - it doesn't include articles written for other publications!

Hindsight is 20/20 of course, but it seems there should have been the suspicion that someone who can discover, investigate and report on a newsworthy phenomenon every 2.5 days for 5 years straight might be cutting corners somewhere.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Just the opposite for me

[jbeaupre]

I almost became the source of misquotes.

I got a call one night from a local TV station asking if I would mind asking some questions. Sure, might as well have my opinion count in some poll. So they proceed to ask questions about politics in Serbia. I was pretty proud I could give informed answers. But towards the end, when I prefaced an answer with "Well, I'm not an expert, but.." the woman said, "Wait, aren't you _____ the international relations expert?" I said "No, I'm _____ the engineer." Turns out I was being mistakenly interviewed because the real expert and I had the same name.

I still think I had good answers.

Re:Whew!

[Swamii]

From the parent,
Heck, even on Slashdot the editors don't just make stuff up so that it fits their story.

From the Slashdot headline,
"Wired Online Retracts Stories"

From the flippin' article,
Wired News is not retracting any of these stories.

Re:Whew!

[isometrick]

And now it's "Wired Amends Stories With Fabricated Quotes" ...

Now, why would Wired add in their own fabricated quotes after all of this trouble with Delio?