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DaveHerbert's comments

DaveHerbert | 2 years ago | on: The Case of the Fake Sherlock

We open the story on the McGuffin case, and then go back in time to the 1950s, and then catch up with the story in 2010. He's just convicted the one time.

DaveHerbert | 3 years ago | on: The Case of the Fake Sherlock

I highly recommend the experience. They have fantastic editors, and the fact-checking team is among the strongest and most thorough that I've ever worked with.

DaveHerbert | 3 years ago | on: The Case of the Fake Sherlock

Good questions. Journalists often rely on the previous reporting of their peers. If newspaper reporters, who work on tight deadlines, needed to fact check every single word in a story, they'd never publish anything. Instead, they check an old NYT story, confirm the details as previously reported, and move on.

This reasonable instinct can also give way to a broader laziness in reporting, though. Existing narratives are repeated verbatim, and we forget to go back to the bare facts and ask "what really happened, here?"

In this case, I saw the official narrative that the press had reported for 40 years. And then I saw scattered breadcrumbs that told a very different story about Richard Walter. I followed that trail, and here we are.

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