Dear readers, you have spoken! and I owe an apology to both of you. I was mistaken: the New York DMV does allow eight-character license plates for a personalized Empire State plate. The type of plate I referenced is different from the one in the picture. My error lay in believing that personal license plates were all the same, but obviously not.
Apologies also to Mr. Sorkin, Mr. Murdoch, and Ms. Maddow are also in order. Especially to Ms. Maddow: gravely have I insulted thee by lumping you together with Murdoch!
Yes, the post was about getting facts straight, so the irony weighs heavily. I try to teach my students to be accurate in their research, and believe it or not, I try to live up to that myself. But even Homer nods, and I'm nowhere near Homer's stature. Live and learn.
More importantly, though, truth in research presupposes honesty. Fact-checking is just a special case of that; necessary retractions are another. And so I want to reiterate that. Correct me where I'm wrong.
The original topic in the 2008 post had to do with photojournalistic fraud - photoshopping pictures that are supposedly factual - which is not merely a lapse in the fact-checking but a deliberate breach of trust in the media/audience relation. What's so insidious about it, it seems to me, is that it takes advantage of two beliefs: the first one being that "seeing is believing" and the second being "publication = true".
Maybe you're thinking, "Oh come on, don't be so naive. Wake up and pay attention: there are plenty of sharks out there, ready to put one over on you." I'm aware of that. But it doesn't excuse the shysters' conduct. Everyone makes mistakes, that's bad but unavoidable; but not everyone commits fraud, which is really bad and definitely avoidable.
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