What is a fact, anyway? | The New Yorker

Every tribe has its myths, and journalists are no exception. In the United States, a common story goes something like this: Once upon a time, in prelapsarian times, before social media — or before smartphones or the Internet — there was a time when journalists were trusted. At the time, everyone read heavy-handed daily newspapers and watched live television reports. When citizens had to make political decisions, a strong social contract with the media ensured that they were well informed; Even if they couldn’t always agree on what to do or who to vote for, they could rely on a shared set of facts. But then something changed: people stopped paying attention to the news or decided they no longer believed it. They were distracted by podcasts, Facebook and Twitch. They became misinformed and began acting against their best interests. The media has decayed and fragmented, as has the nation. Opinion and news became indistinguishable, disinformation was unleashed, and this is how we came to live in the world of post-truth.

This story is not without merit. Trust in many institutions has declined over the years, but in journalism it has collapsed. In 1972, Gallup began asking people in the United States: “How much do you trust the media?” The numbers used to be very favorable – in 1976, more than seventy percent said they had a lot, and very few said they had none – but in 2024, a plurality of respondents (thirty-six percent) said that ‘they had “none at a time”. all.” ONE investigation Of how Americans rate the ethics of various professions, only a fifth rate journalists’ standards as “high” or “very high”: a better ranking than car salesmen and senators, but worse than bankers and chiropractors. (Nearly half said journalists’ standards were “low” or “very low.”) A growing number of Americans report not following the news, or doing so through factually unreliable social or alternative media. In some parts of the world the situation appears rosier – the Nordic states, still on the outside, have much higher levels of public trust in journalism – but a recent study of twenty-eight countries showed that the balance between trust and distrust in the media was neutral at best, and negative among the most developed countries.

Meanwhile, large swaths of the industry are in retreat, buffeted by falling advertising revenues, hostile governments and declining audiences. In the United States, the number of people employed in newsrooms fell by more than a quarter between 2008 and 2020; thousands of people have been fired in 2024 alone. In 2022-23, the Committee to Protect Journalists recorded more journalists imprisoned around the world than ever before. Technological change – more recently and acutely, the integration of generative artificial intelligence– presents its own challenges, as does political polarization. In the United States, for example, the erosion of trust in journalism has been sharper and more consistent among Republican voters, and it can appear, in both parties, that many people are turning to the news more to assert oneself and to be informed. What passes for truth often depends on where you stand on the political spectrum: It’s no coincidence that Donald Trump’s social media venture has the word “truth” in its name .

It’s a dark picture. But buried in the statistics is another story, one in which people worry about misinformation, even if they can’t agree on what to call it. “Fake news” is not a new concept, but many Americans are now expressing discontent with inaccurate or unverified information on social media, and a majority Now I think someone, maybe even the federal government, should do something about this. There appears to be widespread recognition that bad facts are bad news – globally, fears of a “information warfare» are on the rise and, despite rampant skepticism and distraction, there is a persistent thirst for reliable information. The question is where to find it and how can its suppliers make themselves heard amid the noise?

One response was to turn up the volume: to pronounce loud and clear that, in a fallen world, only the We can provide precision. Networks such as NBC and the BBC have launched units dedicated to fact-checking what others say – instead of fact-checking their own work – and for the first presidential debate of 2024, the New York Times tasked twenty-nine employees with combing through candidate declarations in real time. Not all players in the accuracy economy are equally large or well-resourced: over the past decade, hundreds of small fact-checking websites have sprung up around the world, including in countries like India, where press freedom is far from being a priority. guarantee. (Many of these sites received significant funding from Meta’s third-party fact-checking program, which the company announced was ending earlier this week.)

Whether rooted in services or business strategy, this sort of “political fact-checking,” which highlights specific claims and seeks to confirm or refute them, is hardly neutral. Intended to counter inaccuracies, it often takes the form of a rebuttal and necessarily involves editorial decisions about what to cover. (No agency can scrutinize every statement made by every politician, and none of them want to.) An insistent focus on misinformation may even inflate the scale of the problem—to the benefit of what writer Joseph Bernstein wrote. tagged Big misinformation, and to the detriment of the attractiveness of a publication to unengaged readers. Whether journalists feel worth listening to depends as much on how they do their work and how readers use it as it does on what they actually say. The provision of facts does not, in itself, engender trust.

What is more certain is that, from time to time, every journalist, no matter how well-intentioned, makes a mistake or misses the point. This is true even though—as Columbia University journalism professor Michael Schudson has argued—American journalism today is deeper, more analytical, and more investigative than it was fifty years ago. years. If there ever was a golden age of journalism, we may be living in it. The problem is that it’s not enough to point out other people’s mistakes. If people want to trust journalists, we have to earn it.

The New Yorker is known for its precision. At least that’s what the magazine says. Really, it depends who you ask. A prospectus announcing the first issue of The New Yorkerin 1925, promised that:

Compared to the newspaper, The New Yorker will be interpretive rather than stenographic. He will publish facts that he will have to go behind the scenes to obtain, but he will not deal with scandal for scandal’s sake or sensation for sensation’s sake. His integrity will be above all suspicion.

Faithful to this mandate, The New Yorker maintains an obsessive interest in facts, and it did not take long for early editors to recognize the usefulness of at least basic shorthand. In 1927, the magazine published a Profile of the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay“America’s first starlet.” Its first sentence – “Edna Millay’s father was a longshoreman on the docks of Rockland, Maine” – sounded good, but, like much else in the article, it was not true: Millay’s father was a school teacher turned insurance agent. Embarrassment inspired The New Yorkerthe founding editor of, Harold Rossto set up a fact-checking department, and since then, fact-checkers have left their mark all over the magazine. John McPhee, in a essay published in 2009, described fact-checking as a pursuit bordering on mania. To support one of his important but flawed anecdotes about nuclear war reactors, an auditor spent days making calls that “ricocheted all over the United States: from Brookhaven to Bethesda, from La Jolla to Los Alamos.” The pursuit culminated, moments before press deadline, with a call to a Florida police department, which the auditor tapped to track down a crucial witness who turned out to have been at the mall. He called the auditor from a phone booth, just in time to correct a mistake.

Few articles require such heroism: the reality is that fact-checkers are busy people, who only occasionally practice the dark arts of in-depth research. Most facts can be verified quite easily today, especially through the Internet, but because there are so many, a fact-checker must prioritize. (Merriam-Webster defines a fact as “a piece of information presented as having objective reality”; a long piece can contain thousands.) When a particular fact proves sticky, persistence and attention, rather than some sort of special knowledge, are usually what is needed. Ladies are not infallible and their successes are mainly due to their hard work and creativity. The truly amazing thing about any fact-checking service is that it exists. At the time of writing these lines, nearly thirty people are working in Control at The New Yorkeralmost all full time. It is work, on a large scale, that produces precision.

But the pursuit of accuracy – that is, confirming that a fact is a fact – is only part of the project. With a few pragmatic exceptions, fact-checkers review everything published by the magazine, paying attention to balance, fairness and context. Writers are invited to share their sources; auditors review both research materials (books, articles, emails, documents) and original reports. For complex topics, and where necessary for corroboration purposes, they carry out their own independent research, possibly contacting relevant experts. And, unless there is a good reason not to, they contact all the people and entities mentioned in the story and comb through what is attributed to them or said about them. .