For the Fact Checkers, With Gratitude

By Bob Love

 On this Thanksgiving weekend, I am grateful to my loving wife and my terrific family, but I would like to close it out with a heartfelt prayer of gratitude to all the fact-checkers who saved my bacon over the last few decades. These tireless, gig-economy searchers for truth spared me from embarrassment countless times, kept me out of horrifying depositions with libel attorneys, and prevented my stories’ appearances in the “corrections” columns for the most part throughout my long career as a journalist. Who wouldn’t be grateful?

In my opinion, fact checkers perform work that is close to divine—they toil in sunless cubicles, poring monk-like over writers’ notes, re-calling sources, nailing down obscurities, untangling spin, dueling with publicists, then double- and triple-checking documents if that is what certainty requires. It is hard, selfless labor, attracting hardy souls who can muster long stretches of great concentration in the service of a greater good (Truth! Accuracy!). The essential thing to get, however is this: When fact-checkers are doing their jobs well, they go unnoticed and unheralded. But, one fat-finger-fudge of a keystroke, one tiny transposition that creates a misspelling and it looks like they’ve been playing Candy Crush all day. 

I know this to be true, because I was a fact-checker. I ran research departments at New York and Rolling Stone. It was superlative training for my later turns as a Features Editor, Managing Editor and now Editor-in-Chief. And I can heartily endorse this career path for young women and men now entering the business. On this holiday weekend I therefore offer a prayer of gratitude and respect to my colleagues now and then in the fact-checking business.

A few days ago, the nation mourned the passing of William Ruckelshaus, 87, who stepped into the history books during the Watergate impeachment investigations. He quit his job as Deputy AG in the Justice Department rather than carry out President Nixon’s order to fire independent prosecutor Leon Jaworski. Bill Ruckelshaus had served as the first head of the Environmental Protection Agency from 1970-1973 and later returned to rescue the agency from scandal in the years 1983 to 1985. That’s when our fates intersected, so to speak, though I never met the man.

At Rolling Stone in those years, we often wrote about environmental matters, so his name was familiar to me. But late one night, after I sent one such story on its way to the printing plant, I awoke from a fitful sleep, sat bolt upright in bed, my heart pounding from a bad dream. Did I spell his name Ruckleshaus or Ruckelshaus? L-E or E-L? I had no idea. Today, Microsoft Word throws up a red flare at the first (incorrect) spelling. But I didn’t know that until I got to the office the next day that I had indeed screwed up.

There was enough time to sneak the correction into the final blue-lines, erasing the insult to Mr. Ruckelshaus’s print legacy and removing the blot from my escutcheon. I think you get the point by now. The stressy, obsessive nature of the job gets in your bones and invades your sleep.

 Nightmare on Fifth Avenue

At New York magazine, it was deadline o’clock, which arrived once a week back then. The conundrum? Should the place be annotated as: “the Sherry-Netherland Hotel”? Or just the “Sherry-Netherland”? Or the hyphen-free “Sherry Netherland [lower-case-h] hotel? Even today, Google won’t save you from a bout of OCD in this regard if you give a hoot (see above). That night back in the late 1970s, the Yellow Pages said: No hyphen! The desk clerk answered: Yes hyphen! There was nothing left to do, so I skipped dinner and ran from our office on Second Avenue and East 41st to the hotel on Fifth and 59th Street. To my horror, the spelling on the awning was different than the iteration of the name on the plaque outside the building, which forty years later is gone. We went with the hyphen. The Sherry had won this round; there was no certainty in factville that night.

If this all sounds a bit obsessive, it is. But it is also necessary. Small and perhaps insignificant as these examples may seem, the foundations of reader trust and journalistic accuracy are built here. Upon thousands of decisions like these every day—on tiny details and larger matters like proper sourcing, fair comment and handling off-the-record quotes. 

Well, I’ve run on too long, so I’ll close with this: When William Ruckelshaus returned to the EPA in 1983, after a scandal had destroyed public trust in the agency, several thousand employees came out to meet him. There was loud applause and homemade signs of welcome, and, according to published reports, one of those signs read, “How do you spell relief? Ruckelshaus.”

So let's get it right.