The Assault on Reason's hidden endnotes

Where do they find these people?

Weekly Standard senior editor Andrew Ferguson opened his Washington Post Outlook piece on Sunday by asserting there are no footnotes in Al Gore's book The Assault on Reason:

You can't really blame Al Gore for not using footnotes in his new book, "The Assault on Reason." It's a sprawling, untidy blast of indignation, and annotating it with footnotes would be like trying to slip rubber bands around a puddle of quicksilver. Still, I'd love to know where he found the scary quote from Abraham Lincoln that he uses on page 88.

"[L]ike trying to slip rubber bands around a puddle of quicksilver"? In fact, as Bob Somerby and Eric Boehlert point out, the book has endnotes, not footnotes. Did Ferguson open the book? How could he not know this?

In the world of the Post, such a colossal mistake results in this one-sentence correction a couple days of later:

Andrew Ferguson's June 10 Outlook article, "What Al Wishes Abe Said," said that former vice president Al Gore's book "The Assault on Reason" does not contain footnotes. The book contains 20 pages of endnotes.

In his piece, Ferguson goes on to make a seemingly persuasive case that the Lincoln quote Gore uses on page 88 is bogus. But how much trust can we place in someone who can't find 20 pages of endnotes in a 320 page book? They're listed in the table of contents! I can even look up the exact citation that Gore uses on Amazon Inside the Book. In a profession other than opinion journalism, this kind of sloppiness would destroy your career.

Comments

[Diana Marit Kunkel]

While the technicalities of the error were easy to catch by an editor, the Post (and other MSM) will not do so if the story fits in with the prevailing "meme" about Gore -- that he will say or misstate anything to win an argument. When facts hit up against this paradigm, the paradigm wins. We saw this behavior by the Post throughout the 2000 election campaign and it contributed significantly to Gore's defeat by an unqualified opponent.

[Rob]

If only it were true that this sort of sloppiness is tolerated only in opinion journalism. Sadly, mistakes on the news side of the paper are every bit as common, and don't appear to be the career-destroyers you imagine.

Remember Jayson Blair? Here's part of the Wikipedia entry on him:

By 2000, his editors were rebuking Blair for the high error rate in his articles and his sloppy work habits, but in January 2001, despite making more mistakes than any other writer in the paper's Metro section, Blair was made a full-time staff reporter.

After several more mistakes, poor evaluations and a period of leave during which he was said to be dealing with "personal problems," Blair's editor Jonathan Landman sent a memo to management, warning them "to stop Jayson from writing for The New York Times. Right now." Instead, in 2002, Blair was promoted to the national desk.

Despite recurring criticism of his performance, he was assigned to the Beltway sniper attacks, in particular because he knew the area and seemed "hungry." Blair wrote 52 stories during the sniper attacks. His reporting errors were so serious that one led a prosecutor to hold a press conference to denounce the claim that "all the evidence" pointed to Lee Boyd Malvo being the shooter. The error rate of Blair's material again became an issue internally. In another instance, Fairfax County, Virginia, prosecutor Bob Horan claimed that 60 percent of a story written by Blair, in which he was quoted, was inaccurate.

Despite such accusations and many corrections the paper was forced to make in the wake of his reporting, Blair continued to cover critical stories for The New York Times, moving from the sniper attacks to national coverage of the Iraq war. In his four years at The Times, Blair wrote more than 600 articles.