It's obvious that a fact checker must check facts, but what kind of facts and for whom? Fact checking is a stage in the publication process where someone attempts to confirm that all the facts given in an author's manuscript are true. For example, if an author were to state: "As T.S. Eliot said in The Waste Land, 'April is the cruelest month...,'" the fact checker would need to check that T.S. Eliot did, indeed, say that, that it was said in a poem called The Waste Land, and that T.S. Eliot was spelled correctly. (That's a rather famous quote; more often quotes would be harder to track down.)
What Gets Verified? It would be impossible to list the range of things that a fact checker might be called upon to verify, but some obvious ones are: spellings of people's names, quotations, titles of published works, movies, plays, films, etc., dates, historical happenings, place names and locations, geographical descriptions, any statement that says something like: "Loophole and Weasel is the largest law firm in..." or "last year the gross national product of the Republic of Mango Pango was 90 trillion dollars," or "the maceration machine can chop two pounds of dates in 5 minutes," and any other sort of categorical statement like that. Facts that might be less obvious that are sometimes checked are descriptions of people (no kidding), definitions of words (does whitlow really mean "an inflammation of the finger or toe"?), distances between places, mathematical formulas and equations, and sometimes even recipes. There's no end to the important and the trivial details that might be checked out by a conscientious publication.
The irony is that the less important the detail, the more difficult it's likely to be to track down. Why would publications go to all this trouble to verify things like whether the term urban sprawl was coined in 1961? Does anyone care? Well, yes, someone might. The person who thought of urban sprawl as a way to describe the encroachment of cities upon the countryside might, for one, but beyond that, the theory behind fact checking is that unless all the facts are right, the reader might not believe any of the facts. And not only might not the reader believe any of the facts in that particular article or story, but also, the reader might lose faith in the credibility of the publication as a whole. So fact checkers will go to great lengths to be sure that there are no inaccuracies in a manuscript, however minute.
Since this is an imperfect world, we know that errors will creep in from time to time, but most fact checkers are fiendishly devoted to the notion that this must not happen. If you have the tenacity of a bulldog and the nose of a bloodhound, you might belong to that special breed that would delight in making fact checking your career.
Who Uses Fact Checkers?
Fact-checking is done on both fiction and nonfiction manuscripts, and the majority of fact checking is done by magazines. Newspapers do not employ fact checkers. Deadline pressures don't allow newspapers the luxury of reconfirming their facts in breaking stories. The reporters doing the story or their editors are expected to get their facts straight, and when they're not sure, they fall back on such words as "alleged," "purported," "approximately," and similar equivocal modifiers.
There is a story that a young cub reporter was so impressed by his editor's admonition that he not state facts as facts unless he was absolutely certain they were true that he reported a wedding something like this:
The bride, allegedly named Wanda Rozzini, claims to be the daughter of Ralph Rozzini, who purports to be an attorney. The supposed mother of the bride, Alicia Rozzini, is presumed to be deceased. The apparent newlyweds are thought to be honeymooning in Greece.
While that story is no doubt an exaggeration, it points up the way that newspapers get around their inability to corroborate information before publication. Interestingly, although newspaper don't have time to verify their facts before publishing a story, newspapers are among the chief sources used by fact checkers to confirm their stories.
Although some book publishers employ independent fact checkers, many do not. Authors of fiction often resent fact checkers and do not appreciate having them meddle with their manuscripts. Novelists with big names and plenty of clout with their publishers often refuse to have the facts in their manuscripts verified.
Publishers of textbooks, technical materials, and special interest publications often rely on the authors to get their facts straight because outside fact checking would be such a monumental task, and anyway, the authors are presumed to be authorities on their particular subjects. There's another irony here: as with newspapers, these are the very types of publications that fact checkers use as authoritative references!
Whatever the manuscript, a fact checker needs tact in dealing with the author. Nobody likes to be told he doesn't know what he's talking about, and authors, in particular, sometimes have prickly egos. One fact checker, an older woman, felt that a line in an article about retirement in Mexico was inappropriate. The line was, "Of course, if you're thinking of retiring to Mexico, you wouldn't want to consider Mexico City; the elevation would make it too difficult for you to breathe." The fact checker had never met the author, but she presumed him to be a young whippersnapper who thought anyone over 40 had a foot in the grave, so she had to delicately suggest that perhaps not all older people were so infirm that they couldn't handle a bit of a height.
