In a recent New York Times column titled, “Should The Times Be a Truth Vigilante?” public editor Arthur S. Brisbane asks “whether news reporters should challenge ‘facts’ that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.” This quickly generated another question in the media and on Twitter: what exactly is the Times’s army of fact-checkers doing all day, other than apparently twiddling their thumbs? The author didn’t expect readers to take him quite so literally (particularly his headline, in this case), and wanted readers to weigh in on an issue in journalism that is less black and white than one might think.
