Wrong

(So the "enter" button is not functioning on my new laptop. Smashing! Please just go with the, ahem, *flow* here. Pretend you're reading Kerouak.)...I had a dream this morning that a friend of mine wrote an article about me. The article was an interview with totally fabricated "quotes" about my career of and passion for growing organic heirloom tomatoes, and it was published in a science or natural foods journal...In the dream, the article was bemusing to me. I guess fallacies about me growing tomatoes don't really matter to me, since I don't have any tomato-growing reputation to uphold...I've probably written about 1000 factual errors into my articles n the real world, though. I know this because I didn't go to journalism school or anything, and so no ethos of fact-cheking was drilled into my skull. I just turned my artilces in, assuming everything was right. That's what I've come to realize is the cause of almost all printed mistakes--assumptions. I simply does not occurr to the writers or editors that a given fact could be either inaccurate or just plain wrong...I still write for an alternative weekly (the North Bay Bohemian, check it out, www.bohemian.com). For a while I was staff writer there, and I churned out copy like a Chinese factory. At the time, we were of fairly limited rescources (I was THE staff writer, as in the only writer on staff--it's still that way, too, only there's a new staff writer). We had a part-time copy editor/fact-checker, and then a freelance proofreader who came in oncwe a week. The copy editor did his best, and he caught many a potentially horrendous mistake...But he couldn't catch them all. I shudder to think of some of the crap that's gotten into that paper on my account. It's not malicious, just the combined result of laziness and/or oblivousness. Even the alt-weeklies with the best reputations in the country have to print tons of corrections. (This, I think, is partially because of limited resourcves, and partially because they take on material that's more contraversial, and also in greater depth, than mainstream papers.)...But now that I work at the chocolate maker, I see the other side of the story. For a company that does not actively chase it, we get tons of media exposure--glossy magazines, TV mornign news programs, nationally sydicated newspaper services. Last week we got a huge-ass box of press clipping from our PR service (who, I'll admit, don't otherwise lift a finger). Two small children could have fit into this box. I waded through its contents, sorting them out across our massive conference-room table. Most of the articles were duplicates from syndicates, and I threw them away...Dude, though, these articles suck. They just don't get it. Half of them have headlines like "For the Love of Chocolate" of "Passion of Chocolate"--banal crap that any idiot could vomit up. The gist of these articles is always something like "gee, chocolate is great, and now, chocolate is even greater! Isn't that sweet? Har har!"...Yick. It serves as a good reminder of why I'll only pitch or accept stories that are of deep interest to me, because I don't want to disserveice my readers, my subject, or myself by sounding like some dippy hack...You would not belive the errors in these stories. Chocolate and cacao growing is such a complex subject--it practically begs for error, in fact. So it's hard to gloss over 3,000 years of history and do a decent job. I've seen few writers do it right. There's this dude, Mort Rosenblum, who jusr came out with a book called "Chocolate: A Bittersweet Saga", and it's peppered with stuff that's just plain wrong. (Speaking of wrong, his name my not be Rosenblum, so *I* might be the wrong one, too). This dude used to edit some big fancy international paper, so you'd think he'd know the importants of getting the facts right. And I bet his heart is in the right place, but perhaps Rosenblum's head is too big a match for it. The dude straight-up makes shit up, just for the sake of appearing clever...It's good for me to be exposed to all of this. Every time I write an article, I owe it to the world for it to be a correct as I can make it. The sting of messing up the details of someone's life still pricks me now and then, even if it's been several years since the offending article appeared. It's a crappy way to learn, and it's only mildly effective (how soon we forget! oh, the terrible cycle!)...And I'm sure I'll be wrong 1000 more times this ear. But at least I'm prepared for it.