In the spring of 2017, right before I graduated college, I interviewed for an internship at The Nation. At the start of the interview, the editor who interviewed me asked me why I wanted the internship. I was incredibly nervous, and I babbled off something about The Nation’s tradition of using writing to hold power accountable, saying that I had done some of that in my own writing throughout college.
The editor hesitated.
“You do know it’s mostly a fact-checking internship, right?” he said. “There’s not much writing.”
I did know that, and I quickly scrambled to correct myself and avoid the impression that all I cared about was writing. I got the internship and spent the next six months as one of six fact-checkers at the magazine. That six-month period coincided with a bonanza of Trump-era high crimes and misdemeanors: there was an attempted “skinny repeal” of Obamacare, a slew of hirings and firings, and finally the maelstrom of debate over what became the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. At every step of the way, Trump and his lackeys lied to the American public about what they were doing. The entire news media, from print papers to television networks, was grappling with the question of how to describe all these false and misleading statements.
At the center of this debate was the figure of “the fact-checker,” a relatively new media typology whose job it was to call out falsehoods disseminated by public figures. This figure had its origins in Obama-era websites like the Poynter Institute’s PolitiFact, as well as the Washington Post’s “Fact Checker” column, headed by Glenn Kessler. The job of the fact-checker was to pick apart a statement, marshal all relevant and reliable evidence, and then evaluate the truthfulness of a claim: PolitiFact reserved a “pants-on-fire” metric for the worst lies, while Kessler graded on a Pinocchio scale.
Granted, the Republican Party had already been in pants-on-fire territory for a while: there was the “reality-based community” quip from Karl Rove, not to mention Stephen Colbert’s parodic notion of “truthiness.” Against a serial fabulist like Trump, and buoyed by outraged notions of liberal resistance to fascism, the practice of fact-checking took on an almost chivalric status: correspondents like Daniel Dale, who had the unenviable job of fact-checking Trump rallies as they happened, became minor celebrities for their willingness to wade through the sludge of the president’s speeches.
As many of you are probably aware, the job of being a fact-checker at a print magazine like The Nation bears no resemblance to the work done by people like Dale. Rather, the job of most fact-checkers in the news media is to pick apart the work of their own colleagues, stress-testing it for accuracy and ensuring that every story is ironclad against legal action. In the case of The Nation, since most of the writers were on the left side of the political spectrum, this job entailed less of standing up for truth and more of playing devil’s advocate, looking for holes in arguments that appealed to me and challenging the work of writers I otherwise admired. (This work often makes fact-checking a very annoying process for writers, and leads many writers to view fact-checkers as a second-class species. This view was immortalized in Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, which portrays the fact-checking staff of The New Yorker as a bunch of loveless nerds, which they probably were.)
Fact-checking for magazines and newspapers was the work that sustained me through my first three years as a freelance journalist, and it is still the work that sustains a great many of my most treasured friends and colleagues. I believe it is very noble work, since it requires a commitment to skepticism and the courage to challenge your own beliefs and the beliefs of those around you.
The fact-checking of public figures and politicians, though, is another matter, especially when it comes to Trump. The cottage industry of Truth Defense™ that sprang up under our last president was by turns ineffective and embarrassing. It became clear early on that the president could get away with saying anything, that millions of people (and most elected Republicans) either believed whatever came out of his mouth or knew it was false and didn’t care. (Hillary Clinton had a live website where members of her staff fact-checked Trump during the debates.) As early as January 2017, people were already demanding that liberals “stop trying to fact check fascism and fight it,” but even three years later, at the outset of the pandemic, many major news organizations were still parroting many of Trump’s falsehoods; fact-checkers like Kessler, meanwhile, often nitpicked benign campaign phraseology from progressives like Bernie Sanders.
This cottage industry’s most consequential test came two months ago, after the election, when the entire mainstream media found itself forced to append “falsely” and “baselessly” and “without evidence” to Trump’s thousand-plus claims of voter fraud. This truth-defense effort soon morphed into a tango between the media and Big Tech over the question of whether the president has a right to lie, culminating in the suspension of the president’s Twitter account.
Trump has departed office, but a plurality of Republicans still believe the election was stolen, and no amount of fact-checking is going to convince them otherwise. This problem is often described as a problem with “his supporters,” a demented segment of the country’s population who have an ontological fealty to Trump, but in truth the problem is older and deeper than that. The balkanization of political media has thrust us into a media environment reminiscent of the late nineteenth century, a moment when competing newspaper conglomerates published biased and often contradictory headlines and when people held entrenched and extreme opinions based on highly skewed accounts of each day’s events. It’s not just about existing in an algorithm-fed “bubble” but also about there being so much information out there that we can only assimilate the pieces that confirm our existing beliefs. Fact-checkers like Kessler and Dale operate within these boundaries, not outside of them: their appeals to objective evidence take place within a fragmented ecosystem where no single source can ever have credibility with the entire population.
I am sure that President Biden and his team will publish their share of falsehoods, but the fact-checkers who call these falsehoods out will not be hailed as heroes or noble defenders of the truth. Indeed the Truth Defenders will probably not get much airtime at all over the next four years, except maybe insofar as the broken clocks at Fox News are right twice a day. What is more, the government will function the same during this period of relative honesty as it did during the previous era of constant lying: the president will do stuff, people will form radically divergent opinions about it, and they will consume information through media sources designed to cater to their opinions.
In such an environment we need less of the hark-there-sir fact-checking practiced by Kessler and more of the thankless, behind-the-scenes fact-checking that I had to do at The Nation. Even those of us who don’t watch cable news are guilty of trafficking in misinformation: over the past four years I have watched countless progressives and leftists repeat claims that are no less biased than the canards peddled by Fox and MSNBC, lending credence to conspiracy theories about election results and hackneyed accounts of how Congress functions.
I hope this can come to an end now, that with the eight-hundred-pound gorilla out of the room we can learn again to question everything and to judge each new event and each new claim on its own merits. It is my opinion that being on the left entails a commitment to skepticism, to intellectual humility, and over the next four years I hope that my fellow progressives can practice more of that skepticism, whether they love or loathe the new occupant of the Oval Office. In other words I hope we can start to think of fact-checking not as a public intervention but as a private discipline, not as sophistry but as the proper function of a progressive conscience.