The 'usually' suspect

There’s something perversely fun about finding an error in the New Yorker. I’m sorry—it’s correctly italicized The New Yorker, which is precisely the point. It’s the center of a cult, one that takes the magazine’s every editorial decision at face value. I’m hardly immune. In middle school, I used to put an umlaut over the second consecutive vowel in words like “reëvaluate.” In time, I re-evaluated my blind loyalty. The New Yorker, like anything, is fallible.

I’d love to say the error I caught as I flipped through “The Talk of the Town” was substantive, but it was the kind of thing that any writer or reader could miss—a piece of trivia hinging on a single word. In an article on a new awards ceremony for artists, Kate Taylor wrote, “The idea was to replicate the announcement of the Oscar nominees, which usually features the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and a previous Best Actor or Actress.” This sounds good! A fact-checker probably looked up last year’s nomination ceremony, which featured, yes, Best Actor Forest Whitaker, and signed off on the sentence.

But I thought back to past years, when I rose before seven (yup) to catch the live announcement of Oscar nominees. I recalled presentations by Salma Hayek (Best Actress nominee, not winner) and Marisa Tomei (Best Supporting Actress)—I wasn’t sure that “usually” was the right word to describe how frequently recipients of the biggest Oscars show up on nomination morning. They usually have better things to do! Through YouTube and Flickr accounts of people far more obsessed even than I—but without them, casually fact-checking hunches would be a lot harder—I found that only five of the last 14 celebrity announcers at the Oscar nomination ceremony had won Best Actor or Actress (and that two of those celebrities were Kathy Bates. I don’t know what to make of that). This isn’t “usually,” certainly. I felt a certain excitement at beating the fact-checkingest magazine at its own game as I saw non-Best Actresses like Geena Davis, Mira Sorvino, and Sigourney Weaver—and I was disappointed, too.

Why does it matter? It’s a very minor sentence in the context of Taylor’s article, meant only to draw attention to the arts awards ceremony’s new traditions. And yet, how can we trust the veracity of any of the article’s facts when one fact was glossed over by Taylor and her fact-checkers? Yes, the fact is about Oscar trivia—but the article itself is about an awards show, no less trivial. What else did Taylor get wrong, if she doesn’t take awards shows seriously? Why is she bothering to write about awards shows, anyhow?

Arts journalism has been plagued by this fast-and-loose style of reporting for as long as I’ve been reading Entertainment Weekly. Press-junket quotes from celebrities are reported utterly credulously (read any celebrity profile, particularly of a particularly thin actress who has a “quick metabolism,” or a fey male actor with a “girlfriend”). Box office grosses that are “impressive” in one outlet are “disappointing” in the next, with no objective facts to compare them against. If you’re the terrifying Hollywood blogger Nikki Finke, box office results for a single film can be impressive and disappointing within a single post, as her self-redaction on a post about Michael Jackson’s “This Is It” indicated.

What is left for the media consumer who actually cares about the arts—what films and even awards shows can say about our culture, with their place at the intersection of commerce and self-expression—is a Wild West of citations. When placed in the context of a magazine with harder-hitting content, arts journalism has the potential to degrade the whole enterprise. For those who care about the arts, it’s more than unfortunate, but it should be a shame for anyone who cares about accurate reporting. Then again, it’s more interesting to put together a shoddily sourced piece than no piece at all. Our culture’s hunger for content at all costs leads to snarky articles—about everything from Jon Gosselin to arts awards ceremonies—that one hardly expects to tell the truth.

I’m no stranger to corrections—the last time I wrote a professional piece, a personal essay, people mentioned therein remembered events differently than I did. I hadn’t bothered to check my facts, assuming memory was enough. The correction I got was shameful enough to keep me Googling my own and other people’s facts for hours—I took it seriously. Maybe a correction in The New Yorker for Taylor’s tiny error, despite the loss in trust from readers who would otherwise be none the wiser, would cause lazier arts reporters to remember that even the smaller assignments demand accuracy, and to re-establish (no umlaut) their commitment to facts.

Daniel D’Addario is a Columbia College senior majoring in American studies and English. He is the managing editor of the Columbia Political Review. The Unbearable LOLness of Being runs alternate Mondays. opinion@columbiaspectator.com