Epistemic hygiene can be a bit tricky with fiction that gets it right on something and blatantly gets it wrong on other things, but the blame I believe has to be put on the education system that fails abismally in teaching critical thinking, rather than upon writers who fail at fact-checking.
The issue isn’t that writers don’t fact check but that they purpusefully make up facts to make their story “better”. Those facts then get accepted as true by many people.
Epistemic hygiene can be a bit tricky with fiction that gets it right on something and blatantly gets it wrong on other things, but the blame I believe has to be put on the education system that fails abismally in teaching critical thinking, rather than upon writers who fail at fact-checking.
The issue isn’t that writers don’t fact check but that they purpusefully make up facts to make their story “better”. Those facts then get accepted as true by many people.