I see Ruth Shalit has been up to her old shit.
Good for The Atlantic to offer a mea culpa as part of their corrections, but I also want to suggest this isn't a problem of bad fact checking. Fact checking wasn't required to catch this. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/11/squash-lacrosse-niche-sports-ivy-league-admissions/616474/

All you really need to prevent the kind of shenanigans that Shalit is up to here is to read carefully and closely. @ErikWemple did it and then backed up his close reading by consulting sources and experts. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/10/30/atlantics-troubled-niche-sports-story/

Fact checking as we know from Shalit, and Stephen Glass, that merely confirms what the writer says happened with the people they talked to, is easily exploitable. Shalit here did exactly what Glass did on dozens of stories.

I was never responsible for august publications like the New Republic or The Atlantic, but I did edit the columns at McSweeney's for six or seven years, some of which were reported narratives or personal essays. I had no time or resources for fact checking. I still caught fibs.

It was only a handful of times, but it's pretty easy, if you're reading closely, to see the too good detail, or the too convenient quote. When I saw one, I wouldn't investigate. I would just tell the writer that I didn't believe this and the reader wouldn't either.

In every single case the original author confessed to goosing the truth in an effort to up the effect. What's important is that in every single case, the goosing had the opposite impact. It moved the piece away from truth.

These were no big deal. The authors revised and we published. The accurate, nuanced story is always more interesting than the kind of ginned up narrative that Shalit peddled here. Sure, there was a lot of gawking at what she wrote, but you gawk at car crashes.

Ultimately, a car crash isn't that interesting, spectacle isn't that interesting. I didn't read Shalit's piece until after I saw @ErikWemple call it out, but the red flags are blaring and the current correction doesn't come close to addressing them.

As for Ruth Shalit, one of the things I think we've seen from other serial plagiarists/fabricators is that we're looking at some kind of pathology. I believe in forgiveness and second chances and all that, but these folks just aren't wired with the values we expect of journalists

As a reader, if something shocks you because it seems unbelievable, it just might be. If you roll your eyes at a detail, it might be because it's bogus. Editing the McSweeney's columns led me to trust my human instincts - as long as I was reading carefully.

It's the fencing detail that jumped off the page to me. If 12-year-olds are routinely getting skewered to the point of opening bleeding gashes, there would've been safety accommodations years ago. Our world just doesn't allow for such things to happen.

Also, a backyard Olympic-sized hockey rink is absurd. There's maybe a handful of them in North America period. That Shalit would goose this is such a clear sign of the pathology. It's utterly unnecessary to the point, but to her, also apparently irresistible.

Social media has made it much less likely for these sorts of fabricated incidents to pass undetected. Stephen Glass would've been busted very quickly in the current atmosphere. Of course, at the same time, social media allows total B.S. to exist and be passed off as news.