The need to fact-check reader mail

I've been meaning to blog for a while about one of my latest pet peeves: media (especially print media) who don't fact-check letters to the editor and other reader mail. Sometimes I see letters on the letters to the editor page where the reader has a nice bundle of outrage based on something that is just plain wrong. I don't mean the reader's opinion is wrong, I mean the facts on which the outrage is based are incorrect. For example, the reader might take their total tax burden (which includes income tax, sales tax, capital gains tax, and some other taxes I don't know about) but call it their income tax burden. Or they might be outraged about something based on a misconception of, say, how the senate works, when the thing that they're outraged about doesn't actually exist because the senate doesn't work that way. Or they might be complaining about a law that is no longer in effect.

This is problematic, because people are inclined to take what they read in the newspaper as fact. Even when the piece of writing in question is an opinion, readers are likely to accept the facts on which it is based, even if they are incorrect. It's also a disservice to the reader who sent in the letter with the incorrect facts, because it makes them look stupid in public.

Here is a minor example, not as serious as some of the other misinformed reader letters I've seen, but demonstrates the point. A couple of weeks ago, Globe and Mail columnist Karen von Hahn wrote a column about customer service, and readers replied with emails bitching about or defending customer service representatives.

Virginia, who thanked me for my "affirming" column about the "daily charade of service," wrote of her recent encounter at a Loblaws checkout counter. The young cashier held up an item of produce and asked, "What's this?" "Now I admit that there are numerous fruits and vegetables in today's supermarkets that I cannot name," she wrote, "but imagine my surprise that I have to answer 'lettuce.'"

The problem here, of course, is that there are several kinds of lettuce available, and the cashier needed to know which kind it was so that she could type in the correct code. Perhaps Virginia didn't know this, but by printing her comments without mentioning anywhere that there are different kinds of lettuce, the newspaper is validating what she's saying and implying that there's nothing wrong with it. So now people are going to be running around thinking Loblaws cashiers can't even recognize lettuce, when in actual fact they couldn't identify a specific variety of lettuce when they didn't have the other kinds of lettuce to compare it to.

I'm not saying newspapers should make their readers look stupid by printing letters and then refuting them, but perhaps they should make an effort to print only those letters that are factually correct, or arrange it so that misconceptions in reader letters are refuted by other reader letters in the same column. The only possible good that can come of printing a factually-incorrect reader letter is that it will fill up column space, but there's no point in filling up column space if it is only going to spread misconceptions.