Why We Fact-Check

When writers present a piece as nonfiction, they create a contract with the reader. This is true whether the piece in question is a newspaper article, a magazine feature, or the script for a documentary. The writer is saying this happened. To bolster their account, they present evidence including, though certainly not limited to, quotes from experts, data, and eyewitness reports. Together, these sources give the story a foundation. The overarching argument that the writer builds on top of this foundation is important, too: it tells the reader not only did this happen, but here is the context in which you should consider what happened.

But somewhere between all the reading, interviewing, and thinking, the foundation may crack and crumble. Maybe the problem is minimal — a simple misunderstanding or copy error, like flubbing a person's official title or inadvertently transposing the digits in a number. If the crack is small and the remaining sources are solid, the story could survive. Still, it's a crack, and an observant reader starts to wonder about the rest of the structure. Take, for example, a 2012 Vogue profile of Chelsea Clinton in which Daniel Baer, who at the time was the Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor at the U.S. Department of State, was identified as an interior designer. At its surface, flubbing a job title is a relatively small misunderstanding. But knowing this particular flub, do you trust the rest of the story?

Then there are the more glaring problems that shake a story's foundation: explanations oversimplified to the point that they are wrong, credulous sources, and gross misunderstandings of an event and its context. Take, for example, the 2012 Supreme Court ruling on the Affordable Care Act, when both CNN and Fox News briefly reported that a controversial and key piece — the individual mandate — had been struck when in fact it had not. Or consider a 2015 article by New York Times tech writer Nick Bilton, which suggested that wearable technologies are as bad for your health as smoking cigarettes. Science writers criticized the story, pointing out that Bilton cherry-picked a handful of studies that tried to link cell phones to cancer — ignoring a swath of research that said otherwise — and also quoted a controversial alternative medicine proponent as an expert. The mistake ultimately resulted in a response from the newspaper's public editor, Margaret Sullivan, and the online version later included a 200-word addendum.

Even worse are full-blown earthquakes where the writer commits plagiarism or publishes outright alterations or fabrications of quotes, or other lies. For examples of journalistic misconduct, look no further than Jayson Blair, who plagiarized and fabricated stories for the New York Times including a series on the Washington Sniper in 2002; Patricia Smith, who fabricated pieces of her Boston Globe column; Jonah Lehrer, who self-plagiarized several posts for the New Yorker blog and also made up several Bob Dylan quotes in his book Imagine; Stephen Glass, who not only fabricated stories but also his fact-checking notes and sources while working for the New Republic; Judith Miller, who relied on inaccurate sources in her coverage leading up to the Iraq War; or Michael Finkel, who made up a composite character, along with other fabrications, for a New York Times Magazine profile in 2002. All of these writers committed these sins in order to tell a good yarn or make a persuasive argument.

In other cases, writers may twist the ground rules with a source in order to use or attribute material that wasn't agreed upon. Usually, writers and their sources will be clear about whether the source's comments are on the record, which means their identity may be included in the story, or on background, in which it may not (for definitions and further discussion, see chapter 4). Writers should honor these and other rules of source attribution, but a look at their interview notes and recordings may reveal that they, in fact, have not.

There are also grayer areas that fall between simple errors or intentional rule breaking. A writer's own biases may sneak into the work. Writers and editors, too, while crafting a compelling and page-turning narrative, may shuffle a few facts to help with the story's flow. And when a writer has spent weeks, months, or even years on a piece, it is difficult, if not impossible, to step outside to catch these mistakes. A blind spot will probably continue to be a blind spot. Further, each newspaper, book publisher, magazine, podcast, and more has a unique worldview and the stories it shares will reflect that, which adds another layer of perspective and spin on how a story is told.

Independent fact-checkers — people who are not involved in the story's creation — temper these gray areas and catch the more obvious and easy mistakes. "Fact-checkers, we're like the janitors, the custodians. We clean up after everybody," says Beatrice Hogan, the former research chief at More magazine. Indeed, a good fact-checker goes through a story both word by word and from a big-picture view, zooming in to examine each individual fact or statement and then zooming out to see whether the story's premise is sound. The fact-checker's presence does not absolve the writer and the editor from their mistakes; the responsibility is on everyone to deliver the most accurate story possible. Still, the fact-checker will likely feel the weight of a mistake the most, particularly if it was an oversight on their part or the insertion of an error where there was none before, and not an error the team made collectively. The fact-checker is indeed like a janitor, but an especially meticulous and skeptical one.

It's also worth noting that a fact-checking department is only as good as its media outlet allows it to be. If everyone involved in a story, from the writer to the editors to the art department, respects the craft of fact-checking, this support only furthers the cause. If the staff doesn't care for the fact-checking process, or if checkers feel that they can't speak up when they see a story's foundation crumbling, the entire process is doomed.

Fact-checking is also important when it comes to the Internet, both in using online sources and consuming online media. This is particularly true in an age where hoaxes make it into national news reports unchecked. There is nothing inherently bad about online information, and it isn't necessarily unique from a historical perspective. Hoaxes, sensationalism, and other wildly inaccurate accounts were around long before we went digital. Take, for example, the Winsted Wildman of Connecticut, an old Bigfoot hoax, or the yellow journalism of the 1890s, like the time William Randolph Hearst used his newspapers to fan the flames of the Spanish-American War.

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