What's happening to cats? When unverified good news came from the sea

The American journalist and editor Ralph Pulitzer has always remained somewhat in the shadow of his father, the legendary Joseph Pulitzer, who, considered the driving force behind modern journalism, is the man after whom the most honorable award in the profession is named. This is surely because Ralph Pulitzer's thoughtful and cautious nature is not. that his father had founded, the New York World, he deviated from the most innovative sensationalism he had no choice but to inherit and sought mechanisms that would provide journalism with internal control. In 1913, two years after taking over the newspaper, he established the Bureau of Accuracy and Fair Play, an office exclusively dedicated to reviewing errors and handling reader complaints. A kind of fact-checker before the letter.He put the journalist Isaac D. White, considered the first, in charge of the office. ombudsman of history, the reader's advocate. He is a relevant figure who is still current today and who major newspapers strive to maintain in the name of the newspaper's prestige. At ARA, journalist Antoni Batista follows in the footsteps of the rigorous and meticulous White.

When he had been in office for a short time, Isaac D. White noticed a curious pattern in the pages of the New York WorldThe city had a very important port, and therefore the newspaper had a maritime news section, where it was common to find reports about shipwrecks. The man was struck by the fact that six of those articles always referred to a cat that had been heroically rescued from the ship by a sailor who risked his life, moved by the desperation of the animal at being abandoned.ombudsman He suspected that narrative coincidence and consulted the journalist specializing in maritime issues: "What's with the cats?"[What's up with cats?] The editor was sincere. He explained that one day the crew of a sunken ship went back to retrieve a cat that had been left on the boat. The journalist made the little animal the protagonist of his story and gave the tale an epic quality that was very much appreciated by the reader. They were criticized for the lack of journalistic flair they had shown when approaching the news, since they had not paid attention to the feline's epic story. The article included the anecdote of a supposed cat rescued by the crew. New York World He didn't mention it because he had no record of any rescues. But then it was his own editor who, the next day, scolded him for having missed that very good detail, which the rest of his colleagues had noticed. From that day on, rescuing cats became a professional precaution. "Now, whenever there's a shipwreck, we all put a cat in." It was a time when stories coming from the sea were so powerful that the sea became a place to get good news without too much cross-checking. In fact, a year earlier, in 1912, The Evening Sun had published in its evening edition that all passengers on the Titanic They had survived thanks to the lifeboats.