currents

Hard Numbers

Who do you trust?
October 1, 2012

193 pages in the Supreme Court’s Affordable Care Act decision

2 pages of the decision CNN and Fox News producers read before reporting, incorrectly, that the individual mandate was struck down

3 page number on which the mandate was said to be upheld

Sign up for CJR's daily email

59 seconds between the distribution of the ACA ruling to reporters and Fox News’s inaccurate broadcast. CNN took 64 seconds to get it wrong

11 minutes between CNN’s erroneous report and its issuing a formal correction. Fox never issued a correction.

50 percentage of TribLocal staffers laid off when Tribune outsourced its hyperlocal news to Journatic in April 2012

350+ fake bylines by Journatic freelancers published in The Houston Chronicle

35-40 cents per story paid to Journatic writers in the Philippines

12-14 dollars per story paid to Journatic writers in the US

7 quotes attributed to Bob Dylan in the first chapter of Jonah Lehrer’s book Imagine that were either misquoted or made up

5 stories Wall Street Journal intern Liane Membis wrote or contributed to before she was fired for fabricating sources

21/25 percentages of Americans who have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in television news and newspapers, respectively, as of June 2012

Sara Morrison is a former assistant editor at CJR. Follow her on Twitter @saramorrison.