Today’s Wall Street Journal had an article about Caruana on the front page. It touched on the World Championship, but more focused on him and So “defecting” to the U.S. Carlsen comes off very petty.
I’d include a link, but I think it is behind a paywall.
Alex Relyea
Yeah, I read it, it sort of glosses over the fact that Caruana was born in USA and learned to play chess in USA, but only went to play in Italy because he couldn’t make a living at it in the USA at the time.
So is a different situation.
Exactly.
Sadly, journalists in general are getting very shoddy in checking facts. Probably a side effect of living in an age where news feeds come in stamp size bits and the sheer volume of news makes it easier to just publish a correction buried in the newspaper days later on a page where few people would bother to read it.
I know quite a few working journalists, most of them are very good at checking facts.
However, there are other factors.
One is that the more you know about the subject matter, the more you are going to find mistakes in an article written by someone who has spent a few hours researching what you’ve been deeply involved in, possibly for years.
Another is time. Matthew Arnold once said, “Journalism is literature in a hurry.” The problem is, trying to meet a deadline often causes you to have to stop researching and start writing.
A third issue is editorial perspective. There are many ways to write or edit an article, some of them will present one point of view, others will present a rather different point of view using the same set of facts.