Professional journalism is supposed to be “factual,” “accurate,” or just plain true. Is it? Has news accuracy been getting better or worse in the last decade? How does it vary between news organizations, and how do other information sources rate? Is professional journalism more or less accurate than everything else on the internet? These all seem like important questions, so I’ve been poking around, trying to figure out what we know and don’t know about the accuracy of our news sources. Meanwhile, the online news corrections process continues to evolve, which gives us hope that the news will become more accurate in the future.

Accuracy is a hard thing to measure because it’s a hard thing to define. There are subjective and objective errors, and no standard way of determining whether a reported fact is true or false. But a small group of academics has been grappling with these questions since the early 20th century, and undertaking periodic news accuracy surveys. The results aren’t encouraging. The last big study of mainstream reporting accuracy found errors (defined below) in 59% of 4,800 stories across 14 metro newspapers. This level of inaccuracy — where about one in every two articles contains an error — has persisted for as long as news accuracy has been studied, over seven decades now.

With the explosion of available information, more than ever it’s time to get serious about accuracy, about knowing which sources can be trusted. Fortunately, there are emerging techniques that might help us to measure media accuracy cheaply, and then increase it. We could continuously sample a news source’s output to produce ongoing accuracy estimates, and build social software to help the audience report and filter errors. Meticulously applied, this approach would give a measure of the accuracy of each information source, and a measure of the efficiency of their corrections process (currently only about 3% of all errors are corrected.) The goal of any newsroom is to get the first number down and the second number up. I am tired of editorials proclaiming that a news organization is dedicated to the truth. That’s so easy to say that it’s meaningless. I want an accuracy process that gives us something more than a rosy feeling.

This is a long post, but there are lots of pretty pictures. Let’s begin with what we know about the problem.

Continue reading Measuring and improving accuracy in journalism