What Do Fact-Checkers and Anesthesiologists Have in Common?
sigmundcarlandalfred.wordpress.com
If you’re even just a light reader of highbrow periodicals and you’ve managed to miss seeing a review of The Lifespan of a Fact by John D’Agata and Jim Fingal, you’ve accomplished the equivalent of standing in a blizzard without one flake of snow landing on your shoulder. With coverage in the New York Times book review and magazine, Harper’s, the New Yorker blog, Salon, and Slate, “The Lifespan of a Fact” has managed one of those periodic book release PR juggernauts that writers privately fantasize about. The book is a reprint of an essay about a suicide in Las Vegas that D’Agata submitted to the Believer along with text from the wildly extended and heated argument that then ensued between him and Fingal, his fact checker at the magazine. Things started off poorly. The now-infamous first sentence alone was riddled with errors. Here’s just one of them: D’Agata writes that there were “34 licensed strip clubs” in Vegas at the time of the suicide. Fingal’s research suggests there were only 31, and he asks D’Agata how he got 34. “Because the rhythm of ‘34′ works better in that sentence than the rhythm of ‘31,’” D’Agata replies, as if this were a fiction workshop. Things degenerate from there.
As a former fact checker for a variety of Conde Nast magazines, including around four years atVogue, and a stint as the Research Chief at the now-defunct Radar, I took an immediate interest in the book and its coverage. While D’Agata’s extraordinary and often blithe defense of purposefully printing errors and flat-out fabrications in a non fiction essay is compelling, as is his obnoxious tone with his fact checker - villains of course often make for exciting characters - I found myself thinking more about the underdog, Fingal. Specifically, how does his role as the fact checker fit, or not, within our society?
IN A CULTURE that favors sensation, the fact checker is an anomaly, perhaps even anathema. He is the brakes on editors and writers racing toward deadline intent on dazzling readers at the expense of edifying them. He is the schoolmarm tsk tsking. He is the public defender for the unrepresented, the downtrodden, the forgotten—the facts.