Interestingly I had had more editing done in journals -- not fact-checking, although some journals (including law journals) will check your quotes -- than I hear of in book publishing. There is still fact checking in a few places -- as Doug says, where litigation might be an issue, and in a few magazines lie the New Yorker and National Geographic. (My sister used be a fact checker for National Geo.)
But, basically, no one looks over the author's shoulder nowadays -- correction comes post fact in reviews and critiques by other scholars as well as, occasionally, through proceedings like this. In the circumstances, any rigorous examination will find a fair number of errors and some things that might look like plagiarism.
15 years or so ago a Princeton historian named David Abraham was crucified for essentially minor errors in a book he wrote on big business and the rise of Hitler; he's now in legal academia; his book is discredited though it is in fact quite good, and a second edition (not published by Princeton) has been issued correcting the factual mistakes. He was a leftist scholar the victim of a systematic war by right winger professors from Yale and elsewhere. John Wiener has a good discussion of this somewhere.
More recently there was that Emory historian whose name I forget whose National-Book-Award or Bancroft Prize (or both) winning treatise on guns in early America and the meaning of the 2d Amendment was ripped apart; his awards were stripped from him, and I believe he was force to resign his tenured professorship, his career, like Abraham's destroyed.. The errors were trivial and possible plagiarism was buried in some footnotes, inessential to the argument, and actually credibly explained by an argument from carelessness.
I doubt that most scholars' work would escape a careful and intense examination unscathed, Doug's included. Which is all the more reason for leftist to be super careful. The standards are higher for us -- no point in bitching an moaning about it. Remember what Chuck said about the ruling ideas of the epoch. Also remember what Tommy (Hobbes) said about if it was in any man's interest with respect to power or money to deny that the interior angles of a triangle add up to 360 degrees (or some similar geometric truth), he would deny it.
Where Churchill falls into this I cannot say. Unlike the case with the other two guys I have not read the books or careful debate about the scholarly problems. The stuff I have read on the list makes it look Not Good for Churchill, worse than carelessness. It may be unfair that he was prosecuted in this connection because of an irrelevant and stupid remark in a totally different context, but if a scholar is going to be inflammatory he also better be, like Norman Finkelstein, scrupulously and rigorously accurate. I'd hesitate to hold Churchill up as a poster boy for persecution until we know more, and if he fucked up or worse, I think we should not make excuses for him. It makes us look like e don't care about integrity or truth. But as I say, I reserve judgment pending further information.
jks
--- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> Colin Brace wrote:
>
> >Just out of curiousity: how much did Verso "edit"
> your Wall Sreet
> >book? I mean, did some fact-checker go through all
> your citations or
> >did they basically just print your ms as is?
>
> Virtually no editing at all. A right-wing student
> who used Wall
> Street in a class, and was very displeased,
> factchecked it and came
> up empty-handed.
>
> This isn't unusual for trade book publishing. Unless
> a work is likely
> to provoke litigation, it's barely checked at all.
> Some copy-editors
> will do some checking, but there's nothing formal.
> University presses
> usually send out manuscripts for review by scholars
> in the field, so
> they may notice errors because of their expertise.
> But there too
> there's no formal fact-checking, as there is with
> The New Yorker.
>
> >As an aside, I remember speaking once to an editor
> at SEP who told me
> >that Chomsky required that his mss be printed "as
> is" (no editing
> >allowed).
>
> Yup. Verso pub'd a book of his years ago and tried
> to make some
> edits. Chomsky would have none of it.
>
> Doug
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