This year there were two epic screwups in fact checking in books published by authors on the left and right.
On the left, Naomi Wolf published her book Outrages: Sex, Censorship and the Criminalization of Love which, among other things discussed dozens of executions of homosexual men in Great Britain during the Victorian era. It turned out, however, that notations that Wolf concluded were evidence of an execution having been carried out were actually cases of a judge recommending the pardoning of a death sentence.
On the right, Doug Wead’s Inside Trump’s White House caused a stir by claiming that the Obama White House subjected intelligence officials to “nonstop PC [political correctness] meetings.” It turned out, sadly for Wead, that “PC” in this context refers not to “political correctness” but rather to meetings of the National Security Council Principals Committee. The officials that Wead interviewed were essentially complaining that under the Obama administration they had to vet their decisions with this committee, whereas the Trump administration let them more freely make decisions lower down the chain of command.
Everyone’s worried about deep fakes and false statements spread through social media, but what does that matter if authors and publishers can’t even be bothered to make certain they are accurately understanding and explaining key parts of their books?
In my opinion the issue isn’t so much deep fakes and social media–lies widely dispersed by the media have been with us since the birth of the newspaper–but the sort of credulity and confirmation bias that people like Wead and Wolf fall victim to (and those who support them…Wolf, for example, has repeated nonsensical claim after nonsensical claim her entire career and yet has no problem finding a publisher, an audience, and an alarming degree of respectability in some circles).