The Limits of the Wisdom of Crowds

There’s an important kernel hidden within Clark Hoyt’s mea culpa for an error-filled New York Times article occasioned by the death of Walter Cronkite:

“Wow,” said Arthur Cooper, a reader from Manhattan. “How did this happen?”

The short answer is that a television critic with a history of errors wrote hastily and failed to double-check her work, and editors who should have been vigilant were not.

But a more nuanced answer is that even a newspaper like The Times, with layers of editing to ensure accuracy, can go off the rails when communication is poor, individuals do not bear down hard enough, and they make assumptions about what others have done. Five editors read the article at different times, but none subjected it to rigorous fact-checking, even after catching two other errors in it. And three editors combined to cause one of the errors themselves.

I think there’s something missing from that analysis. I see it as a damning indictment of the concept of a journalistic profession and J-schools.

The purpose of a journalism school is to inculcate in its students a way of thinking. That is the very nature of a profession and it’s very useful in the law or medicine but deleterious to journalism. Many people are more effective than a single person only when the many have different knowledge, thought processes, and biases from each other and when there is no pressure to imitate.

That’s the opposite of what has happened in journalism over the last fifty years and when so many know, think, and believe the same thing, there’s insufficient incentive to criticize, and you’re under pressure to publish (as has always been the case with newspapers), the results may be so filled with errors that you may as well get your information from other unreliable sources like blogs or Twitter.