BOB GARFIELD: Ombudsmen could possibly prevent the next Jayson Blair fiasco from coming down the pike, but there may be yet another way to achieve accuracy. Mistakes could be caught by fact-checkers. According to Brendan Koerner, they do it all the time in the magazine world. Koerner examined the culture of fact-checking for Slate. Brendan, welcome back to OTM.

BRENDAN KOERNER: Thanks for having me.

BOB GARFIELD: Your recent explainer was called Who Uses Fact-Checkers Anyway? Well, let's start with the obvious question: Who does not use fact-checkers.

BRENDAN KOERNER: Well for the most part it's daily publications like newspapers. And it's really a matter of the sheer volume of stories being printed. The turnaround time is so quick -- there might be only a few hours between the time a story is turned in at, say, midnight and the time it hits the streets at 5 or 6 a.m. But there are quite a few stories in papers nowadays that have a more investigative bent, and you've actually seen a few papers experiment with checking some of these stories. For instance the San Jose Mercury News has experimented with checking technology and science stories, cause they've actually set up, experimentally at least, an advisory board filled with technologists and scientists to go over some of the more complex stories that pass through the paper. So I think there's room for some stories, but in the case of the-- stories that Mr. Blair fabricated for the New York Times, I think that's quite difficult cause many of them were beat stories and the sniper beats, working on the families of POWs. Those are things that had to go in the paper right the next day --only a few hours after he turned them in. And it's almost impossible with those kinds of time pressures to do adequate fact-checking.

BOB GARFIELD:Magazines come out weekly or sometimes monthly; sometimes once every other month. They have a lot more time to check facts. But what's their methodology? How do they do it?

BRENDAN KOERNER: The typical approach is you have a fact desk which takes copy from a writer and they expect a source list and a list of documents that the reporter relied on to construct the story. Then they go through really with a fine tooth comb and they call up every source -- they don't check quotes, necessarily, but they will check titles, they will check, say, if a source says this is a fact or this is the way things are. They're not going to take the source's word for it. They'll try and go and get backup for that fact the source cited. And it really is a pretty onerous process. It ranges, but you know some of the most legendary fact departments like those at the New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly, they really go through each and every sentence and make sure everything is on the up and up.

BOB GARFIELD:You know I actually once [LAUGHS] did a piece for Playboy, and having come from the world of newspapers, was simply not aware that they were going to be vetting my story for accuracy. And I reported my piece accurately but-- you know - sloppily, and-- how surprised was I when they asked me to come up with all this information on absolutely every single assertion I made in my piece, and I was thoroughly unprepared for that. None of my notes were in proper condition. It was an eye opener for me.

BRENDAN KOERNER: Well certainly magazine journalists become used to that and they really do try to take very precise notes, often electronic notes nowadays, which can then be forwarded to the fact departments. And they also expect you to annotate their stories quite often. I remember when I was working at U.S. News & World Report, the common practice was for us to mark off each little fact in a story with a letter and then have a corresponding piece of paper that would either have a source's phone number or would be a document that supported that assertion. So you'd have these huge fact files that might be, you know, the thickness of a, of a good-sized coffee table book going down to the fact department every week.

BOB GARFIELD:Now this process is not foolproof. In one of the more bizarre journalistic scandals of the last few years Stephen Glass who was writing for the New Republic magazine actually manipulated the fact-checking system at the magazine. How did he pull that off?

BRENDAN KOERNER: I think the first thing he did that's most interesting is that he would cite unnamed sources. Then when the fact department asked him, you know, to say hey, who gave you this fact, who gave you this quote, he'd say "Well, someone I can't tell you. They gave it to me, you know, top secret, and if you call them, they'll freak out and never talk to me again." And there was a, a level of trust at that magazine at the time whereby his word was taken - you know word is bond - that they were like okay, we're not going to ruin things for you. That was one part of his deception. The second part was really that he would actually set up fake voice mail boxes and even a fake web page to correspond to a fake company once.

BOB GARFIELD:That's unbelievable. And of course it requires more effort than just simply getting the facts right to begin with. So when it comes to accuracy in newspapers, Brendan, I guess we are just plain screwed! We're right back where we started which was just having to trust the source.

BRENDAN KOERNER: Well I think that's true but I think you have to keep in mind that thousands of reporters out there really take their time to make sure every single fact in their stories is accurate. So I don't think we should say that this one anomaly proves that newspapers therefore are somehow unreliable.

BOB GARFIELD: And radio shows?

BRENDAN KOERNER: Radio shows I don't know about. Those are little dicey.

BOB GARFIELD: Brendan, as always, it's been a pleasure.

BRENDAN KOERNER: Thanks so much, Bob.

BOB GARFIELD: Brendan Koerner is the Explainer columnist for Slate.com. And-- who checks your work?

BRENDAN KOERNER: Absolutely no one. No fact-checkers at Slate. But I am, I am trustworthy. [LAUGHTER]

BOB GARFIELD: I guess time will tell. [MUSIC]

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Coming up, the FCC stonewalls the public over a public trust. Also a reality show that rocked the EU-- and Roger Ailes unveiled.

BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media from NPR.

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