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Comment by vor_ | Hacker News Reader

Several of the subscribers in the comments are so eager to praise Ars for "catching" the error and being honest by retracting the article, as if that's not an expected journalistic standard. They're so happy to have a reason NOT to be upset. This wasn't even caught by Ars or any of its readers. The guy being misquoted had to sign up and post a comment about it.

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I'm happy that they fixed it, checked for any similar errors, and promised that they would improve their processes to try to prevent it from happening again.

This is pretty much what I expect when an organization makes a mistake. Many organizations don't do as well.

the apology for the mistake is fine but it is expected journalistic practice to hand an article to a fact checker before it goes out who will quite literally make sure names, dates, quotes and so on are authentic.

I thought of Ars Technica as a pretty decent publication, now I am wondering if they actually check what they publish.

The New Yorker famously has separate fact checkers, but I'm not sure how many other news organizations do?

Ah, the New Yorker. That's a Condé Nast publication too, just like Ars. There have been any labor incidents involving fact checkers and Condé Nast at the New Yorker recently: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/11/21/conde-nas...

Standard practice at most organisations these days is to apologize then keep doing it, it seems

I mean, honestly, “it was a failure and we won’t do it again” is better than a lot of outlets would do; some have the magic robots wholesale make up articles for them.

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