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Publishers Say 'Fact-Checking Too Costly'
Mr. Ghost writes "Members of the book publishing industry say that profit margins are too small to fact check "non-fiction" books. Instead they rely on the "honesty" of the authors submitting the book. This has come to a head with the revelation from the author of "Million Little Pieces" that he lied about the accounts in his memoirs."
AI programmers have another job to do.... since machine translation is moving along quite well, why not develop a fact checker based on a similar algorithm, that compiles things from various sources and then presents it to a human to do final checking?
-Palal
Shouldn't the headline read Publishers Admit Wikipedia is More Accurate Than Books?
Standard author contract says that the author warrants that their writing is original, factual, etc... and that the author will pay for as many lawyers that the publisher feels their need should there be legal trouble. So there's not a lot of risk for th publisher, and not a huge amount of incentive to spend a lot of effort fact checking. There's still the risk that the author goes bankrupt, and the publisher is back to paying for their own lawyers still, I suppose.
My publisher does some checking for plagarism, since that has come up a couple of times.
I didn't even have time to fact-check this reply!
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
Filing taxes is a big pain, too, so maybe I'll just give that one a miss this year and see how that turns out...
Have fun,
Nathan 'Nato' Uno
http://web.unos.net/
The only people who believed Frey wanted to be fooled: Glory to Dr. Dolan, as they say.
Screw honesty or even decent reporting - to hell with all that! It's too "costly". What happened to the day when it was more important to be right and honest than to sell tons of books/magazines/newspapers?
Disgusting...
My MythTV HowTo
The more people make a big deal of this guy, the more money he makes from publicity. Stop buying his stupid book.
I don't know about yours, but my mother taught me not to believe everything I read / hear / see on TV.
I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous.
I can't expect honesty from my nightly news let alone a biographical book.
Before anyone worries about the standards of Oprah's latest gem we should have something in place to hold "news" publicists/broadcasters responsible for their tripe.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
From TFA
Late Friday afternoon, plaintiff's attorney Marc Bern said he filed a lawsuit against Random House and its Doubleday imprint in U.S. District Court in Manhattan charging that the publishers misrepresented that book as nonfiction. His client, California resident Karen Futernick, alleges in the suit that she purchased "A Million Little Pieces" on that basis but that the defendants "failed to conduct a reasonable investigation or inquiry regarding the truthfulness or accuracy" of the material. Mr. Bern said that he will seek more than $50 million in damages for the plaintiffs. "Nobody can get away with profiting with a product that you represented as something that it is not," says Alan Ripka, another partner in Napoli Bern Ripka LLP, the New York City law firm that filed the suit.
Ayup. $50 Million dollars because she bought a book marked as non-fiction that was actually fictional. If she ever went into the Boston Public Library, we could clear the national deficit just from the Natural Sciences section alone!
People Talking in Movie shows.. people smoking in bed.. people voting republican.. GIVE THEM A BOOT TO THE HEAD!
Fortunate Son was withdrawn from the publisher because A.) The author was utterly unable to provide a single shred of proof for the only new, "bombshell" revelation in the book, i.e. that George W. Bush was once arrested for cocaine possession, and B.) The author turned out to be a liar and convicted felon. He was an ex-con on parole for attempted murder, had pleaded guilty to embezzling more than $34,000 in federal housing funds, none of which he happened to mention to St. Martin's while pitching the book. Plus he was caught making up stories about his background; as a science fiction writer, I especially liked the one about how he was recipient of "the prestigious international Isaac Asimov Foundation Literary Award for Outstanding Biography," which, oddly enough, doesn't exist.)
Michael Bellesiles' Arming America was another demonstrable (although initially more believable and well-crafted) fraud that argued gun ownership in early America was rare. Researchers following up on his work found that some of his source material said the exact opposite of what he claimed. That eventually got Bellesiles fired from his university position, and even had the Bancroft prize committee not only rescind the prize it had awarded him, but ask for the prize money back!
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Hopefully people like Oprah will at least fact-check stuff before hanging their credibility out to dry.
Maybe they'll spell check too
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Oprah ran lies about Hurricane Katrina on her show and she never retracted them. She allowed Mayor Ray Nagin on September 5th claim that "They're murdering people in there (the Superdome)." Louisiana National Guard and State health department officials said no one had been murdered inside the stadium. So what's worse? A book about an addict that was spiced up or a public official using Oprah's airwaves to promote false news to a nation that public policy might have been based off?
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Well, oddly enough, "The Truth About Hillary", a book that describes Hillary Clinton as a lesbian, has not been pulled off of shelves. Neither has that Swift Boat Veterans book about Kerry. It seems that certain lies are more bothersome to certain people.
If you want to read a good book by a liar and a convicted felon, I hear G. Gordon Liddy has a new one coming.
It matters because the book was billed as an honest account of a serious addiction and how to get out of it. If people's view of addiction is twisted by misinformation, that can lead to misunderstandings and inappropriate methods of coping for addicts and their close ones.
None of the four you mention as alternatives have had a book they wrote pulled by the publisher because of inaccuracies in it. Both of the books in the parent comment have been. That's why "those" examples.
If you had read it, you'd feel duped too.
This is slashdot. Even if you haven't read it, you'll feel duped in 48 hours.
The "Million Little Pieces" incedent is minor as far as I am concerned.
Step into the $2.55 million dollar Manhattan penthouse he bought with his lies and you might just change your mind. There's also mention of a summer home in cozy Amagansett.
It also almost got him a screenplay based on the book, and another based on the Hell's Angels. Look him up on IMDb.
Along these lines, Ken Lay's trial has now begun. A theme of his defense is that he was just a good old boy who was misled by evildoers within Enron. Whether or not that's the case
Issues like this pop up fairly often. When does an individual obtain so much power and influence that it becomes not only irresponsible but legally actionable for that person to say "I was misled; and therefore misled you"? One could say, "well, we're all responsible for our own investments," and I guess that's true. All of us reading Slashdot are clearly SuperWise folk who assiduously manage our investments, balance our checkbooks, and clear the cookies out of our browsers every day. But our dear Grandma Gertrude,
In one extreme limit, we protect Grandma Gertrude by creating an oppressive nanny state, in which regulations are thick and heavy
What I am suggesting here is that it might be far more effective to "hang" Oprah --- to stomp her ratings, dent her popularity, deflate her ego --- than it would be to point out that the author of "million little pieces" is an exaggerator. Similarly, it might be more effective to toss Ken Lay in the brig than to contemplate a better regulatory regime.