At least whenever there’s a new fake-memoir scandal or a general railing against “irresponsible bloggers,” which becomes a meaningless phrase as soon as veteran journalists and, ah, newsmen start blogging up a storm.
At other times, fact-checkers are often forgotten, underpaid, and/or belittled as comical Bartlebys, toiling by lamplight with poor eyesight and minimal glitz and celebrating minute victories like the ones chronicled in “Are You Completely Bald?,” a brilliant old New Republic story about the art and agony of fact-checking that’s a lot harder to find than you’d think (and I’ve tried!). Fact-checkers are fussy ghosts, invoked respectfully in their absence and mildly teased for their pedantic obsessions just out of hearing range.*
Except at a few good magazines, primarily The New Yorker, where fact-checking is considered such a vital necessity that only the most well-rounded and world-savvy applicants are interviewed (and I mean interviewed). There’s a reason the checkers there are routinely cited by those outraged about the crimes of too-inventive writers. All fact-checkers grumble, in my experience, but there’s less cause for it when they have steady jobs, salaries, benefits, lore (confess, who would you rather be in Bright Lights, Big City—Nameless Narrator as he wakes up cold and lonely on the friendless street after too much coke, or NN in the library amid the reference volumes, making courageous international phone calls, and paging through, say, Ian Frazier’s notes to verify an intricate New Yorker profile?) and the faith of the majority of the writers whose stories they verify and strengthen.
Speaking of which, Slate’s Daniel Engber has assembled a funny collection of revelations about other well-known autobiographies, past, present, and future. Also on Slate, newyorker.com editor Blake Eskin’s reflection on fake memoirist Misha Defonseca, who was not brought up by wolves as she escaped the Holocaust, is worth reading. If you want a rigorously researched and compelling book, read Eskin’s memoir/exposé A Life in Pieces, whose accounts and investigations are all the more electrifying and poignant for being absolutely true.
While we’re telling panicky book publishers how to conduct their increasingly imperiled business (although the news that people like reading books on paper is somewhat comforting), could we add a politely voiced plea for the return of the publishing-house copy editor? Forget about made-up facts for a moment—I just want most of the words to be spelled right.
*By the way, as a former fact-checker myself, I can assure you that many of them are in fact adorable, attractive, and socially ept.