By Alyssa Rosenberg I'm sure there will be a lot of people writing over the next days and weeks about Jerome Corsi's latest attack book, but this line in the New York Times story stood out to me: "Fact-checking the books can require extensive labor and time from independent journalists, whose work often trails behind the media echo chamber." It's incredible to me that fact-checking basically isn't something you do yourself any more, that quality control is now something that comes after the fact. I know it's expensive and time-consuming, but it's eminently worth it. My first job after college was as National Journal's fact-checker, and while I was in college, I worked in the history and current events division at Yale University Press, where fact-checking wasn't a regular part of the editorial process, and copy-editing was subcontracted out to freelancers who had relationships with the Press. While at NJ, I did some freelance fact-checking for an author on staff who was writing a book. He had to pay me out of his own pocket, because the press he had a contract with didn't consider fact-checking an essential part of the process of putting the book together. In all those experiences, I've worked with maybe one author who was so diligent that he really didn't need me reading back behind him. So while it's amazing that Mary Matalin can call a book with substantial inaccuracies "a piece of scholarship, and a good one at that," she's not the only publisher dispensing with fact-checking. The difference is that while most publishers hope and expect that their authors will be rigorous and careful in checking themselves, Matalin, it seems, couldn't care less.
