The day I became a fact-checker at The New Yorker, I received one set of red pencils and one set of No. 2 pencils. [FC: There used to be a training period before the pencils.] [[VH: O.K. for “the day I became a fact-checker” to designate end of training period?]]
The red pencils were for underlining passages on page proofs of articles that might contain checkable facts. It was not always obvious what to underline. Sometimes a phrase would contain hidden facts, as in “Jane’s youngest son.” You’d have to check maternity and birth order, but you’d also have to confirm that Jane had at least three sons for one to be considered “youngest.” [FC: Wouldn’t the magazine have used her surname?] [[VH: Make it “Doe’s youngest son.”]]
The No. 2’s came next. With them you would draw strike marks through words — and sometimes individual letters — that were confirmed with the help of reference books from the magazine’s library, including Merriam-Webster’s Geographical Dictionary, the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and Burke’s Peerage. [FC: Actual title is Burke’s Peerage and Gentry.] Not infrequently, these imposing-looking books were as wacko as anything now on Wikipedia, as many of them made “facts” of off-the-wall data that hardly seemed to be proper objects of empirical study. (The Social Register, which gave the pedigrees of socialites, comes to mind.)
Fact-checkers also consulted periodicals. The department subscribed to virtually everything and kept newspapers archived on microfilm. Cautionary tales circulated about errors that originated in The New York Times or The Washington Post, only to be replicated and memorialized forever by lazy magazine fact-checkers relying on single news stories. Proper protocol was to consult microfilm of the paper but then to check the next few days’ papers, also on microfilm, on the chance that a correction had been published. This was labor intensive, especially when there seemed to be bigger conceptual fish to fry in complex articles about, say, the O. J. Simpson defense.
In checking long, reported articles, checkers sometimes made dozens of phone calls a week — to bartenders about a restaurant’s ambience, to E.M.T.’s about how stretchers are handled or to anti-abortion activists about the dimensions of ultrasound images on their placards. Not infrequently, checkers were in the diplomacy business, and the best checkers were known for their bedside manners with sources, reporters and editors. Good checkers did not play gotcha, did not gossip about which reporters were error-prone and stayed true to the goals of journalism — to be newsworthy and interesting — as well as to our sub-sublibrarian dedication to factuality.
Eventually, the checking department bought an expensive annual subscription to Nexis [FC: Real name is LexisNexis], the enormous searchable archive of newspapers and periodicals. Checkers used to stand in line to use it. No one seemed to miss microfilm. Older editors maintained that “you can’t trust Nexis,” but then the Web appeared, and the catchphrase among the old guard became “You can’t trust Google.”
Meanwhile, a reverse process was happening in pop culture, as broadband brought millions of facts, the fantasy of perfect factuality and the satisfaction of fact-checking to everyone. Soon — and astonishingly — Google became much more than trusted; it became shorthand for everything that had been recorded in modern history. The Internet wasn’t the accurate or the inaccurate thing; it was the only thing. And fact-checking was no longer just a back-office affair. While it continued to take place in fact-checking departments, something calling itself “fact-checking” now happened out in the open, too. In the ideologically heated months after Sept. 11, 2001, pro-war bloggers like Andrew Sullivan staged point-by-point critical annotations of articles by antiwar journalists, notably Robert Fisk of The Independent, that came to be called “fact checks” or even “fisks.”
These annotations, which still appear on blogs, are aggressive and witty, and they nearly always end with a highhanded, Tory-style Q.E.D.; gloating about gotchas is mandatory. Surprisingly, though, the focus of modern fact checks is rarely what we 20th-century fact-checkers would have underlined as checkable facts. Instead, Web fact-checkers generally try to show how articles presented in earnest are actually self-parody. These acts of reclassifying journalism as parody or fiction — and setting off excerpts so they play as parody — resembles literary criticism more than it does traditional fact-checking.
In short, fact-checking has assumed radically new forms in the past 15 years. Only fact-checkers from legacy media probably miss the quaint old procedures. But if the Web has changed what qualifies as fact-checking, has it also changed what qualifies as a fact? I suspect that facts on the Web are now more rhetorical devices than identifiable objects. But I can’t verify that.
POINTS OF ENTRY: THIS WEEK’S RECOMMENDATIONS
VERACIOUS
“False barbs,” “whoppers” and other kinds of lies — many from the right — get vivaciously debunked at FactCheck.org, a smart initiative of the Annenberg Public Policy Center.
VOLUMINOUS
The first three volumes of “Cosmopolitics,” a philosophy of science text by Isabelle Stengers, are available in English. How do units of scientific discourse — facts — get shaped and charged with authority? “Dense and rich,” says Steven Shaviro, of the excellent philosophy blog The Pinocchio Theory.
VOLUBLE
AmericanRhetoric.com, a giant archive of speeches, is immersive in the extreme. Special roundups include the mesmerizing “Rhetoric of 9-11” and “Rhetorical Figures in Sound,” where you can hear athletes, politicians and others use alliteration and synecdoche.
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