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Malcolm Gladwell and Wendy Kaminer

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Re: Dead Men Don't Lie

By Malcolm Gladwell
Posted Friday, June 12, 1998, at 6:53 PM ET

The only thing that bothers me about the Stephen Glass episode is the way in which all publications have now been divided into those who rigorously fact-check (good) and those who don't (bad). In reality, this distinction is between public and private fact checking. Newspapers (and magazines like The New Republic) are fact checked by their readers, after the fact, and magazines like The New Yorker are fact checked before the fact by staff. Both are actually equally effective methods of discouraging error and fraud. If anything, in fact, I think public fact checking is more effective because, when a correction is run the next days, it is a form of public humiliation.

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(You said you were embarrassed when the Atlantic fact-checkers caught you on something, Wendy, but imagine if your errors were published for all the readers to see.) In my first story for the Washington Post, I said that a certain local company had lost a million dollars in the previous quarter, when in fact they had made a million dollars. When the correction ran the next day (and the stock dropped 5 points) I thought I was going to die. And I NEVER made the same mistake again at The New Yorker. A sharp-eyed fact checker would have caught that immediately. I love this idea of yours, though, that there may be something in cyber-culture that encourages this kind of role-playing and fictionalizing. Engaging in the kind of dialogue we are having is much closer to speech than it is to writing--and as a result subject really to the much less stringent rules of conversation. Things that are ethical lapses in writing are merely imaginative leaps in conversation. If Stephen Glass had only made it clearer that he was doing a monologue, I guess he'd be fine. This also means that nothing I've said this week should EVER be taken literally.

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