Fact Checking: not applicable to geography, apparently

Next time you hear someone saying that what makes journalists unique and different is their fact-checking and professional standards, remember how often things like this happen:

from the Miami Herald: Two British tourists, reported by British media to have been murdered in Miami early Saturday moring, actually died in Sarasota, the British Embassy confirmed Sunday afternoon.

That’s only a couple of hundred miles away. That counts, right? Random Pixels tracked the exposure of the error.

What makes it really depressing to me is that an error in one paper seems to have been picked up and propagated by multiple outlets without any attempt to do their own fact-checking. Shoddy.

If you’re going to claim professional standards, make an attempt to live up to them.