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Fact Check Fears
I’m a solo writing operation. It’s liberating not having a boss. It’s also lonely and frightening not having a support system. I’m not a reporter. I mostly give my opinion on things. Even so, much of my work relies on the facts I cite being correct. I worry quite a lot about getting them wrong. I don’t know how many of you heard the clip of Naomi Wolf being confronted by Matthew Sweet, an interviewer on BBC Radio 3, who calmly informed her that her new book, Outrages: Sex, Censorship and the Criminalization of Love is full of grossly incorrect statements of fact that undercut her central arguments.
Wolf claimed to have discovered that British executions for the crime of sodomy continued decades after historical accounts claimed. Her colossal mistake was based on her misunderstanding of the British legal term “death recorded,” which means the opposite of what it says: No one died. It was a technical way for judges to satisfy the legal requirement of the sentence of death for certain crimes, while sparing those worthy of pardon. Wolf sat through the interview and somehow managed to keep her composure, while she was essentially told that if she’d read through the first page of Google results, she would have gotten the right end of the stick. The vicarious embarrassment was so crushing, it took me several tries to get through the whole clip.
