What this article reports will hardly be any consolation to Filipinos who are finding to their disgust that some of the locally produced textbooks for primary and secondary schoolchildren are not only incompetently written and chockfull of errors but are horribly edited or not even edited (
“Crusader finds 1,300 errors in Grade 10 book in English”). It’s about the growing and incontrovertible evidence that even nonfiction bestsellers published in the United States—books that, of course, are also reading fare of a good number of educated Filipinos—could be riddled with factual errors and inaccuracies because they have not been fact-checked at all.
In “Will Book Publishers Ever Start Fact-checking? They’re Already Starting,” an article that came out in the June 23, 2015 issue of
Vulture.com, New York journalist and book author Boris Kachka reports that the three current nonfiction bestsellers that follow—and by no means are they alone in the industry, he says—were found to have factual inaccuracies, false statistics, or shaky details serious enough to warrant disclaimers or assurances of revision by their respective publishers:
1.
Primates of Park Avenue, a bestselling memoir by Wednesday Martin, an American author, blogger, and commenter on parenting, step-parenting, and popular culture. Major inaccuracies discovered in her book’s supposedly factual narrative have constrained its publisher, Simon & Schuster, to make a disclaimer regarding them.
2.
The Road to Character, a bestselling book by David Brooks, a newspaper columnist, bestselling author, and lecture-circuit thought leader. A key statistic around which the book built its thesis was found to have been badly mangled and wrongly sourced, forcing its publisher, Random House, to announce that the error will be rectified in a future edition.
3.
On the Run, a bestselling quasi-academic account of Philadelphia lawbreakers by Alice Goffman, an American sociologist, urban ethnographer, and assistant university professor. It has come under fire for its shakiness on details. (A critic, not cited in Kachka’s report, argues that “the conventions of ethnography led her to produce a work that can’t be trusted to reflect any reality, let alone a general one.”)
Kachka says that these post-publication problems with inaccuracy happen because by tradition and by default, books aren’t verified to anything near the standard of a magazine piece: “Publishers don’t even consider verification their business. (Nor do newspapers or most websites, which don’t have the time for it; magazines are actually the anomaly here.) Every nonfiction book contract contains a standard author’s warranty: that every fact is true, and that its accuracy is the writer’s sole responsibility. Thus indemnified, the editor focuses on style and narrative, while a copy editor checks basic dates and names.”
But because of these scandals big and small about bestselling books running afoul with accuracy, Kachka says, the status quo might shift a notch this fall: “…(P)ublishers’ see-no-evil culture may slowly change… That would be a relief not only to writers, but also to editors who read about the latest non-memoir or feat of plagiarism and think, there but for the grace of God. ‘It’s every editor’s nightmare,’ says an editor. ‘You live in fear that someone’s gonna get by you. It’s like working for the TSA [Transportation Security Administration]. You don’t want to be the guy who let the terrorist in.’”
We should not only hope but prod the Philippine publishing status quo, particularly those involved in textbook production for public schools, to shift several notches in the same direction.
Read Boris Kachka’s “Will Book Publishers Ever Start Fact-checking? They’re Already Starting” in Vulture.com now!Megan McArdle’s “‘Primates of Park Avenue,’ Stranger Than Nonfiction” in BloombergView.com now! Read David Zweig’s “The facts vs. David Brooks: Startling inaccuracies raise questions about his latest book” in Salon.com now!Read Leon Neyfakh’s “The Ethics of Ethnography,” a critique of the inaccuracies in Alice Goffman’s On The Run, in Slate.com now!RELATED READING FROM THE PHILIPPINES:In “An afternoon with Antonio Calipjo-Go,” an opinion column that came out in the June 30, 2015 issue of
The Standard PHL, veteran journalist and economist-educator Rudy Romero recalls that when he asked the lone crusader against error-riddled Philippine public school textbooks a few years back why he was doing the thankless and perilous job he was doing, Calipjo-Go replied: “Because this work has got to be done. I wish that other people were doing it, but they are not.” Romero concludes: “I don’t think I would be going overboard if I suggested that Antonio Calipjo-Go deserves a high public award—why not a Magsaysay Award?—for his enormous contribution to the cause of providing students anywhere in Asia, not just the Philippines, with textbook information that is reliable and error-free.”
Read Rudy Romero's “An afternoon with Antonio Calipjo-Go” in ManilaStandardToday.com now!
