s/o to the sausage making
Bruhhhh, I am not usually a fan of the two-sentence headline, but “A woman approached The Post with a dramatic — and false — tale about Roy Moore. She appears to be part of an undercover sting operation” from yesterday’s WaPo takes some serious journalistic cake.
Sass mic-dropping header aside, this is a total gotta-read if only for the sausage-making details on HOW, exactly, reporters verify facts every day (i.e., outside of just Googling around).
Reading about this took me back to J-school, where all of us sophomores taking the J2100 News course grumbled 2000% about all the “dumb” “rules” that our professors, who probably all laid awake with night terrors of this kind of Project Veritas sting operation shit, imposed on us. These rules included:
You HAD to have at least three sources in your story, even if it was a dumb piece on the new soccer field opening.
You COULD NOT be related or personally know the sources (so interviewing your roommate was cheating).
You HAD TO call each source back and reread them all the quotes and facts you got from them.
You HAD TO provide a “source sheet” of all the people and references you talked to over the course of reporting out said dumb soccer story.
And there was always this one professor who personally called every single source her students used, just to make sure they had properly fact-checked with them. If, god forbid, you hadn’t actually, you were for sure done-zo with J-school and general academic dignity. We'd pray for you.
At the time, of course, us wanna-be Hunter S. Thompsons were all like ???? this is honestly dumb and unnecessary and ugh so much work???? but man oh man, these prescient-ass profs out there were just looking out.
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