Do you often find yourself in a situation that goes something like this: You: "Remember that old blue Chevy we had back in 1963..." Your spouse: "That Chevy wasn't blue; it was gray." You: "No, it was blue. I distinctly remember it was blue, because..." Spouse: "It was gray." Before you know it you find yourself grimly pawing through old photograph albums looking for that picture you know is there that will show that, quite definitely, the car was blue.
When you tell a story, do you catch yourself saying, "Last Tuesday...no, maybe it was Wednesday...no, that's right, it was Tuesday 'cause it was the day I took the dog to the vet...," when the actual day of the event has nothing to do with the point of story?
Would you be surprised if you received as a gift a T-shirt with this motto on the front: SHE'D RATHER BE RIGHT THAN BE PRESIDENT? If you'd wear this shirt proudly, it probably annoys you when you read something that you're pretty sure contains factual misinformation. You might even look up the offending statement and write a letter to the editor or publisher if you prove to be right.
When you were in school and you had a term paper to do, did you like researching better than you liked writing the paper? Do you love libraries and reference books? Do you like to ask questions? Do you get a thrill out of tracking things down to their source? Do you love it when you can say, "Aha, I knew I'd find it," whatever "it" is?
You don't have to be an adamant rather-be-right-than-be-president type to enjoy fact checking. Many fact checkers who love their work are studious, quiet people who savor the atmosphere surrounding libraries; they're thorough people who delight in tracking down a source, much as a detective hunts down a suspect by following clues; and they're often clever people who have to devise ingenious ways to prove that something is or is not so.
If you relish getting to the bottom of things, if you like having the facts correct whether they're important or not, if you enjoy asking questions and getting answers, if research appeals to you, if you're pretty clever at following a trail of clues to get to an answer, you may have just the temperament to be a fact checker.
Researching Things that Aren't in Books
Being able to find things in published references is basic to being a fact checker, but there are other skills that are helpful. From the examples we've given, it should be apparent that you sometimes need more than a little creativity to figure out where to look to verify your facts. It's by no means possible to verify everything by looking in a book. You'll frequently need to consult experts, and it's not unheard of to have to follow a trail through many people before you can track down what you're looking for. For people who do this work, that's not a drawback, though, that's where the fun comes in!
Telephone Tact
Often you'll need to verify things by telephoning people and asking them to corroborate something that was said in a manuscript. This can be a relatively simple undertaking, but you should be aware that you might sometimes have to ask embarrassing questions that the callee may not be thrilled to respond to. For example, if you were fact checking a celebrity biography, you might have to call the subject and ask, "Is it true that you travelled to Brazil last year to get both a face-lift and a tummy-tuck?"
Although you probably won't often have to get so personal, there's no way of knowing what sorts of facts you'll be asked to check, so you need the ability to ask sometimes awkward questions with tact and diplomacy. As we've said, your tact will stand you in good stead when you're dealing with the author as well.
Some articles cause pain or embarrassment to their subjects; this is inevitable if authors are to write about events that are timely and newsworthy. A prominent banker caught embezzling money or a wealthy stockbroker nabbed for insider trading are newsworthy people. When a magazine publishes an article about a subject like this, a fact checker must often contact the unfortunate person to verify facts or quotations. Some fact checkers become so sympathetic to the person being exposed that they find it difficult to pursue verification, especially if the person responds with something like, "Why are you doing this to me?" A fact checker needs to be relatively thick-skinned in situations like this in order to get the required information.
Meaning vs. Literal Truth
While it's important to have a sense of what to check, it's equally important to be able to see when a statement should be left alone. You generally can't insist that a manuscript be literally true in all respects. For example, if an author says, "He was white with rage," you wouldn't substitute "pale pink" because that's more nearly a skin color. Nor would you change "the crowd went wild" to "all but two people in the crowd went wild" even if that were actually the case. You have to know when the impression the author is trying to convey is more important than totally true-to-life details.
In fiction, especially, the author may want to take some liberties with facts as we know them. If an author wants to say, "His blood boiled," that's okay, even when we know it didn't. When there is ill-will between authors and fact checkers, it's usually because the fact checker insists upon being overzealous and too literal-minded.
While it may seem as if it would be easy to tell the difference between what should be checked and/or changed and what should not, it isn't always that simple. And fact checking is habit-forming. Once you start looking for things that should be verified, you'll find that there's much more that could be checked out than you might have imagined. A good fact checker can differentiate between details that have to be accurate to make the manuscript credible and those that are nit-picking, where changes would reduce the impact of the author's writing style. Accuracy shouldn't be carried to the extreme that an author can't make any statements without qualifying them.
