More on literary hoaxes

After every big literary hoax, the media suddenly remembers earlier ones. ABC News has a slideshow of 19 famous literary hoaxes, and a March 2008 LA Times article lists some other interesting cases.

I find this subject fascinating and I am curious as to what motivates people to do this, especially these days when facts are easier to find and frauds are more likely to discovered (eventually).

And now, a brief rant to the media: Learn from your mistakes! And bring back fact-checkers! (And if you expect editors to fact-check for you, give them the time, training, and resources they need to do it right.) I’ll stop now.

Happy New Year!

Why don’t publishers fact-check memoirs?

A memoir is discovered to be more fiction than fact, a scandal erupts, and the publisher cancels the book. How many times have we heard this story?

In this newest case, the book is a Holocaust memoir titled Angel at the Fence, the love story of Herman Rosenblat and his wife Roma. While Rosenblat was in fact in a concentration camp as a teenager, the love story that captured the imagination of his publisher, Oprah Winfrey, and a movie producer is false. Berkley Books, part of the Penguin group, just canceled the February publication of the book. No word yet on the fate of the planned movie.

You should read Gabriel Sherman’s New Republic article, “The Greatest Love Story Ever Sold,” and his follow-up piece, “Wartime Lies,” which uncovered the story and set the latest events in motion. You should also read Deborah Lipstadt’s series of blog posts titled “Apples over the Fence,” as she cast doubt on the story a year ago, was quoted in Sherman’s article, and has interesting information and commentary about this. Here’s the link to the Angel at the Fence website, and here’s the link to a statement from Rosenblat’s literary agent, Andrea Hurst.

Each time another false memoir scandal emerges, I ask the same question– why don’t publishers fact-check memoirs? I’ve always assumed that memoir was a form of biography and thus should be fact-checked. (I know you can’t fact-check every little detail, conversation, and memory, but shouldn’t the basic premise, events, and story be true?) Why, after James Frey, haven’t things changed at all? And the bigger question– why does a story become more interesting to publishers and readers when it is represented as truth rather than fiction?

Update: Here’s the link to the New York Times‘ December 29th article about it. Here’s TNR’s summary and chronology of the events.

Oops! The New York Times prints a fake letter

I nearly choked on my tea this morning while reading the editor’s note on the letters page of today’s (December 23rd) New York Times:

In Monday’s newspaper, we published a letter over the name of the mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, criticizing Caroline Kennedy. This letter was a fraud and should not have been published. Mr. Delanoë’s office has since confirmed that he did not write it.

Printing the letter, which also appeared on nytimes.com until it was removed, violated the standards and procedures of The New York Times editorial department.

It is our practice to verify the authenticity of every letter we publish. Like more of our letters these days, this one arrived by e-mail. We sent an edited version back to the writer of the e-mail and did not receive a response.

At that point, the letter should have been set aside. It was not.

The Times has expressed its regret to Mr. Delanoë’s office for the lapse in judgment that led to this error. We now express those regrets to our readers.

We will be reviewing our procedures in an attempt to ensure that an error like this is not repeated.

Here’s the link to the The New York Times web page containing the text of the original letter and the online version of the editor’s note, which differs slightly from the printed version.

I know the newspaper industry is in serious financial trouble, but hiring a few fact-checkers might save a lot of embarrassment.

Spell-check is evil, but funny: The Cupertino Effect

I enjoyed Cory Doctorow’s BoingBoing post on the Cupertino Effect, “the technical term for a correct word that is consistently erroneously replaced by spell-checkers.” He links to Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words newsletter, which describes the origin of the term and gives some choice examples:

An automated spelling checker attached to a word-processing program is one of the curses of our times. In the hands of an inexperienced, over-hasty or ignorant user it readily perpetrates dreadful errors in the name of correctness. One example appeared in a piece in the New York Times in October 2005 about Stephen Colbert’s neologism truthiness: throughout it instead referred to trustiness, the first suggestion from the paper’s automated checking software….

In 2000 the second issue of Language Matters, a magazine by the European Commission’s English-language translators, included an article by Elizabeth Muller on the problem with the title Cupertino and After.

Cupertino, the city in California, is best known for hosting the headquarters of Apple Computers. But the term doesn’t come from the firm. The real source is spelling checkers that helpfully include the names of places as well as lists of words. In a notorious case documented by Ms Muller, European writers who omitted the hyphen from co-operation (the standard form in British English) found that their automated checkers were turning it into Cupertino. Being way behind the computing curve, I’m writing this text using Microsoft Word 97, which seems to be the offending software (more recent editions have corrected the error); in that, if you set the language to British English, cooperation does get automatically changed to Cupertino, the first spelling suggestion in the list. For reasons known only to God and to Word’s programmers, the obvious co-operation comes second.

Hence Cupertino effect for the phenomenon and Cupertino for a word or phrase that has been involuntarily transmogrified through ill-programmed computer software unmediated by common sense or timely proofreading.

A search through the Web pages of international organisations such as the UN and NATO (and, of course, the EU) finds lots of examples of the canonical error. A 1999 NATO report mentions the “Organization for Security and Cupertino in Europe”; an EU paper of 2003 talks of “the scope for Cupertino and joint development of programmes”; a UN report dated January 2005 argues for “improving the efficiency of international Cupertino”. And so on.

Other notorious examples of the Cupertino effect include an article in the Denver Post that turned the Harry Potter villain Voldemort into Voltmeter, one in the New York Times that gave the first name of American footballer DeMeco Ryans as Demerol, and a Reuters story which changed the name of the Muttahida Quami movement of Pakistan into the Muttonhead Quail movement.

My favorite example is the 2006 Reuters article about bees, captured in Craig Silverman’s Regret the Error blog:

With its highly evolved social structure of tens of thousands of worker bees commanded by Queen Elizabeth, the honey bee genome could also improve the search for genes linked to social behavior….

Queen Elizabeth has 10 times the lifespan of workers and lays up to 2,000 eggs a day….

Update: A new Cupertino reported in the Huffington Post:  “Burka Abeam” for Barack Obama in a newspaper photo caption.

Want more? Regret the Error has an entertaining list of 2008’s most notorious media errors and corrections.