Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

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Sure, but her point still stands: the disclosure should've been upfront, and the gripping quality of the narrative should've been toned down in the name of precision. The writer is very careful to note his sourcing, and a very careful reader would see that certain declarative statements are coming from the specops officer, or of, say, "A former helicopter pilot with extensive special-operations experience..."

It's not to say that these background sources are wrong. But they're getting pretty filtered info...the after-action report which consists of the compiled recollection of the actual operators.

Again, that report may be 100% truth, and it may even contain known unknowns and concerns of the operators. But can the spec ops officer who talked to the reporter be trusted to have summarized that summary correctly?

Let's say Obama was the New Yorker's secret source. No one would argue that he is not an authoritative and extremely important source regarding the OBL killing. But he is just one source, far removed from the action (remember that there was no helmet cam or otherwise-indoor video), with a definite vested interest in having the first detailed examination of the incident looking good for the WH.

Good point. Access to a confidential source (Obama, a seal, a parent, etc.) would seem to motivate the author to point out its nature and possible fallibility of the account while still enjoying the license to use the account as the basis for a gripping article.

That this author did not do the former suggests a lack of precision that is quite unlike the New Yorker, particular insofar as the subtle "tropes" that its articles occupy are concerned. Even a byline like "Rumors from Pakistan" could have allowed the article to be appreciated at face value without the claim to factual detail that was made.

I guess a lot of this comes back to the fact that this was published in the New Yorker. The New Yorker stakes their brand on the quality of their fact-checking, which to me requires less upfront disclosure. If this story was in fact fabricated, the reality of the story would be the smaller controversy, I'd argue. The real controversy would be the immediate destruction of one of America's most prestigious journalism brands.

To wit, see http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/freelance-jour...

"[New Yorker Editor-in-Chief David] Remnick says he’s satisfied with the accuracy of the account. 'The sources spoke to our fact-checkers,' he said. 'I know who they are. Those are the rules of the road around here. We have the time to do this. There isn’t always time' for publications with shorter deadlines to do the same checking."

The problem isn't whether or not it was "fabricated"...I strongly trust the NY not to publish something that was fabricated by a reporter.

And that's what factcheckers do...help protect reporters from their own mistakes and also, protect the magazine from bad reporters.

In terms of secret situations, they do this by checking with the source. What happens when the source says exactly what the reporter recorded him/her saying, but the source him/herself is mistaken and there's no other way to check for that?

For example. The New Yorker's story has this statement:

>“There was never any question of detaining or capturing him—it wasn’t a split-second decision. No one wanted detainees,” the special-operations officer told me. (The Administration maintains that had bin Laden immediately surrendered he could have been taken alive.)

How does one factcheck this? You can call the source who will verify to you that yes, the reporter has quoted him correctly. Then you can call the administration who can also say, Yes, we have stated that OBL could've surrendered.

So what's truth and what's falsehood? The "truth" is that both parties here stands by their statements. If you want to know the truth about what shooting orders the operators really had, you would either ask an operator himself, or his immediate commanding officer. But the fact-checker doesn't have access to these, so while some anonymous source says that the mission was all about shoot-to-kill...we don't know if this article really gets us closer to the truth of that, and no fact-checker can help here.

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