Diary of a Mad Fact-Checker: Precision Only Gets You So Far
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work on and off as a fact-checker at the most accurate magazine in America. I think so, at least. The checker assigned to this piece may come up with a list of competitors for that title—and in that case I’ll say that, having either been fact-checked by or been a fact-checker at most of them, she can count this fact as my own original reporting. My editor will probably agree and, if she pushes it, tell her that anyway ‘most accurate’ is a qualitative evaluation, like ‘best defensive shortstop,’ or ‘hottest freshman.’ He won’t say, though it’ll be implicit, that the whole idea of The Oxford American assigning an essay about fact-checking works better if the guy they got to write it works as part of the best research department in the country—which makes me seem like an authority—and that it’d be a shame to lose the superlative when the magazine in question isn’t even going to be named. Superlatives, if you pay attention, are how magazines make stories seem worth reading, and not even the checkers at the most accurate magazine in America can fight off all the spurious ones.
A few months ago I wouldn’t have believed that anyone outside New York would care seven thousand words-worth about what I do there, but fact-checking has recently become a voguish topic among the New Yorker-reading and NPR-listening set. This probably has to be the result of two minor controversies—palatably packaged and sold in the manner of political ‘teachable moments’—that hit the middlebrow public this winter within a couple weeks of each other. The first came in February, when a smoothly edited and largely fabricated e-mail exchange between the essayist John D’Agata and Jim Fingal, his fact-checker at The Believer, was released as a book, The Lifespan of a Fact. D’Agata had written a good, but deeply unfactual, essay for Harper’s, which refused to run the piece. He then took it to The Believer, where Fingal—who was then, like most ‘fact-checkers’ at small magazines, just an unpaid intern—was assigned to enumerate the factual issues. What followed, according to the publicity department at Norton, the book’s publisher, ‘was seven years of arguments and approximately one hundred pages of give and take, detailing a factual problem in nearly every one of D’Agata’s sentences, as D’Agata and Fingal struggled to navigate the boundaries of literary nonfiction.’ The book reproduces the ‘give and take,’ formatted around the original essay, which really isn’t a bad piece of literary journalism. The publicity sheet goes on: ‘The Lifespan of a Fact tests the limits of art and challenges the role of the nonfiction writer. After experiencing D’Agata and Fingal debate the line between art and fact, witnessing the position of both the author and the fact-checker falter, the reader is left to ponder if the compulsion to obtain ‘The Truth’ is in fact plausible.’ Sic, with regards to syntax.