Access to verified facts, news and others' opinions is important to everybody.
All too often, there is little effort to verify facts independently.
Drafts of research reports may be shared only to verify facts and only when the research recommendation has been removed.
"However, in his steadfast commitment to speed Ron May is given to shooting from the hip without verifying facts.
In his formal response, posted at www.ojr.org, Mr. Arnold wrote, "publishing independently verified facts that previously appeared elsewhere isn't plagiarism".
For Jane Leavy's 2002 biography, "Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy," Koufax verified facts and told friends they could speak to her, but there was no interview.
The new generation of web-based, mobile and user generated journalism is potentially a wonderful addition to the panoply of news sources, but is no substitute for verified facts and painstaking research which holds public and private institutions to account.
It is not really plausible to suppose, for example, that one's understanding of the historical past is adequately captured in one's experiences of "verifying" facts about it.
But it was based on the work of true professionals who knew their areas, dug deeply and verified facts, knowing they would remain on their beats and feeling responsible for informing their readers.
On the basis that imagination, too, is no more than a fancy, upmarket word for fibbing, acts of fiction remain unknown; at Lecture Films, the movie studio where Mark toils — he is introduced as "one of our least successful screenwriters" — the typical product consists of a blazered bore reciting a plain historical narrative woven from verified facts.
