Fair Checking

By Alec Klein
September 26, 2008

What does “fair” mean?

According to Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary, the first definition is, “pleasing to the eye or mind especially because of fresh, charming, or flawless quality.”

Not quite what I had in mind. I’d propose a different definition for the purposes of investigative business journalism: Fair is being faithful not just to the facts but to the nuances of the story. In the hurried, zigzagging world of journalism, I’m not sure how frequently the question of fairness comes up. Deadlines rush at us at Internet-speed now, fast and frequent in a 24-hour-a-day continuous news cycle, often leaving little time for the business reporter to do more than ensure accuracy—a basic necessity—which can itself be a high hurdle if we’re talking about a fast-breaking business story on, say, enterprise server net income per share.

Think about the routine: The business reporter confronts a tangle of scribbled notes, based on the mystifying language endemic to a specific industry, which then has to be deciphered, organized, analyzed and whipped into a cohesive story with a beginning, middle and end, packed with context and quotes.

Never easy.

So imagine the difficulty involved in adding another step to the reporting process—that is, standing back and pondering the nuances of story, line by line, and asking the question: “Is it fair?”

Somewhere along the way, more than a decade ago, I began asking myself that question in the immediate haze after I’d written a story—but before I filed it. Until then, I had made it an established practice to fact check my own story meticulously before sending it off into the electronic ether on its way to publication.

But it occurred to me that factual accuracy isn’t necessarily the same thing as fairness. In other words, you can present a series of facts that, individually, are accurate but how you assemble those facts may not be fair.

Let’s say you interview a Wall Street analyst who says that the company you’re writing about faces a problem in its business but it’s not as severe as the challenges of its competitors. Is it accurate to write that the company in question faces a problem in its business? Yes. But is it fair to note that problem without putting it in proper perspective, that while there is a problem, it’s not as bad as it is for its competitors?

There’s a misconception in business journalism—and investigative business reporting in particular—that numbers are facts without nuance. But based on years of reporting, I would argue that even—or especially—numbers can be manipulated or viewed subjectively, depending on how they’re handled and presented. And it’s important for business reporters to put numbers—revenue, profit, etc—in proper perspective.

So I decided to coin a phrase: “fair checking.”

I equate it to a beat cop who makes his daily rounds before calling it a night. You poke around, peering into the dark crevices of your story, fact checking names, titles and numbers. But then you make another round, putting yourself in the subject’s shoes and viewing the story through a different lens.

How would you feel if those same facts were written about you? Are they fair? Determining those answers is often not an absolute, but a question of feel; it can be difficult to describe but we know it when we see it.

A different kind of example of fairness: On one business investigation for The Washington Post, I spent weeks tracking down a single anecdote that I knew would likely lead one of my stories in a multipart series. Finding the anecdote required obscure documents, sources and a lot of patience—but I nailed it. That is, until one of my sources asked that I not use the anecdote. This source had not given me the anecdote, but he was concerned that its use could somehow expose him, resulting in him losing his job and career, not to mention his mortgage and the security he provided his family. In my equation, fairness required that I err on the side of caution. So although it pained me greatly and no doubt weakened my story, I did not use the anecdote. My source kept his job. He didn’t thank me. He didn’t have to. What I did was only, in my estimation, fair.

If you’ve been the subject of a story, you may very well know what I mean. It’s a good exercise to switch sides, from interviewer to interviewee, to gain a greater appreciation for reporting that sticks not just to the facts but faithfully adheres to the nuances. It’s an exercise I’ve incorporated into the reporting classes I’ve taught over the years, and invariably it leaves an impression on students about how difficult it is to be accurate—and fair. The task becomes even more daunting when you consider how a single story is magnified when, for instance, it’s Googled on the Web, reprinted in other newspapers and magazines, picked up as a sound bite on radio or television, archived and then retrieved years later by a reporter working on another story.

It’s good to recall synonyms of “fair” in Merriam-Webster’s: “Just, equitable, impartial, unbiased, dispassionate, objective.”

But being fair doesn’t necessarily mean being nice to a fault. Indeed, fairness requires toughness, too—to present both the good and the bad in all their splendor.

Alec Klein is a bestselling author, award-winning investigative business reporter formerly of The Washington Post and professor of business journalism at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.

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Copyright © 2008 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism