Recent fracas about the whole slew of errors in a New York Times appreciation of Walter Cronkite raised the question of who edited the piece. It transpires that the author, a film critic, at one point had her own copy editor to fact-check for her. I’ve never understood the concept of a fact checker. Surely checking facts is what a journalist is supposed to do? Whatever, all copy needs to be read by somebody else before it is published (this blog withstanding). Peter Jay, the British financial journalist who was a for a time ambassador to the United States had a column in the London Times. One day a copy editor came to him with his latest piece and said, “I don’t understand this.”
Jay is reputed to have replied, “There are three people in this country who are able to understand this column, and you are not one of them.”
I hope, I hope, if I had been that copy editor, I would have had the guts to say, “Why don’t you just send them a letter? Here’s a stamp.”
