Facts are simple and facts are straight. Facts are lazy and facts are late.
Facts all come with points of view. Facts don’t do what I want them to.
— “Crosseyed and Painless,” Talking Heads
Every tribe has its myths, and journalists are no exception. In America, one common story goes like this. Once, in the prelapsarian era before social media — or, perhaps, before smartphones, or Ronald Reagan — there was a time when journalists were trusted. Back then, everybody, or at least everybody who mattered, read muscular daily newspapers and watched straight-down-the-line TV reporting. When citizens had to make political decisions, a robust social contract with the media ensured that they were well informed, and even if they couldn’t always agree on what to do or who to vote for, they could rely on the facts.
But then something changed: people stopped paying attention to the news, or decided that they didn’t believe it anymore. They got distracted by cable TV, Facebook and TikTok. They became ill-informed, and started to make decisions that went against their best interests. The media decayed and fragmented, along with the nation. Opinion and news became indistinguishable, misinformation ran amok, and that is how we came to live in the post-truth world.
This story is not unsupported. Polls have long shown declining levels of trust in the media. Trust in many other institutions has fallen too, but in journalism it has plummeted. Since 1972, Gallup has been asking people in the United States, “How much trust and confidence do you have in the mass media?” The numbers used to be highly favourable, but in 2024 (and previously only in 2016 and 2023), more people said they had none (36 per cent) than said they had a lot (31 per cent). At the same time, a survey of how highly Americans rated the ethics of various professions found that only a fifth believed journalists’ ethical standards were “high or very high”: a better ranking than car salespeople and senators, but worse than bankers and chiropractors. Almost half said that journalists’ standards were “low or very low.”
Increasing numbers of Americans say they do not follow the news, and when they do, it is increasingly via factually unreliable social or alternative media. In some places, the picture looks rosier — the Nordic states, outliers as ever, have far higher levels of media trust — but one recent survey showed the balance of media trust and distrust across twenty-eight countries to be neutral at best, and negative among the most developed.
At the same time, large swathes of the news business have been on the retreat, stricken by dwindling advertising revenue, hostile governments and declining audiences. In the United States, the number of working journalists dropped by more than a quarter between 2008 and 2020. Meanwhile, in 2022–23, the Committee to Protect Journalists recorded more journalists jailed worldwide than ever before.
Technological change — most recently and acutely the mainstreaming of generative artificial intelligence — and political polarisation present their own challenges. In the United States, for example, the fall in trust of journalists has been sharper and more consistent among Republican voters, and the conclusion that many people turn to the news more for affirmation than for information can be hard to resist. What passes for truth often depends on where one falls on the political spectrum: it’s no coincidence that Donald Trump’s venture into social media has “truth” in its name.
It’s a grim picture, but buried in the statistics is another story. People still worry about misinformation, even if they can’t agree on what to call it. “Fake news,” aptly defined as “information divorced from reality,” is not a new concept, but more Americans than used to now register displeasure with inaccurate or unverified information on social media, and a majority now think that somebody, perhaps even the federal government, should do something about it. There seems to be widespread recognition that bad facts are bad news — globally, fears of an “information war” are rising — and, despite endemic scepticism and distraction, there is an enduring thirst for reliable information. The question is, where can it be found, and how can its purveyors make themselves heard amid the noise?
One answer has been to lionise accuracy. For some, this represents a business opportunity. NBC, CBS and the BBC have all launched fact-checking units, and for the first presidential debate of 2024, the New York Times tasked twenty-nine staffers with fact-checking the candidates’ statements in real time. Not every entrant in the emergent accuracy economy is as large or well resourced: over the past decade, hundreds of small fact-checking websites have sprung up around the world, including many in countries, such as India, where press freedom is far from a guarantee.
Whether rooted in service or aimed towards revenue, though, this sort of “political fact-checking,” which spotlights specific claims and seeks to prove or disprove them, is not as neutral as some might like to imagine. Setting out to counter and correct inaccuracies, it often takes the form of rebuttal, and necessarily entails editorial decisions over what to cover (no outfit can scrutinise every statement by every politician, and none of them wants to). Its reach is limited, and it is unclear whether it is always helpful: as one journalism professor puts it, “Disinformation itself has become kind of a toxic term for a lot of people.”
An insistent focus on misinformation or disinformation may even inflate the scale of the problem, to the benefit of what the writer Joseph Bernstein has labelled “Big Disinfo,” and to the detriment of a publication’s appeal to uncommitted readers. The provision of accurate facts does not, in itself, necessarily engender trust: “notions of news and truth are linked to what people do with information rather than what journalism unilaterally decides are accurate portrayals of reality,” says media studies researcher Silvio Waisbord.
What is more certain is that from time to time every journalist, no matter how well meaning, gets something wrong, or misses the point. If journalists want to be trusted, they need to not only police the accuracy of others, but also to ensure that their own work is careful and considered. One way to achieve this is to practise the traditional (or “primary”) variety of fact-checking, which, whether carried out by someone called a fact checker or by reporters themselves, aims at verification in advance of publication.
Today, anyone who wants it can find reporting that is, as Michael Schudson puts it, “deeper, more analytical… less fully focused on what happened in the past twenty-four hours, more investigative, and more likely to take “holding government accountable” or “speaking truth to power” as an essential goal” than was the case fifty years ago. If there ever was a golden age of journalism, we may still be living in it. The trouble is, much of the public — turned off, bored, or riled into disbelief — has ceased to listen. Pointing out the mistakes of others is not enough. If people are to trust journalists, we need to earn it.
The New Yorker, where I work, has a reputation for accuracy. At least, that’s what the magazine tells itself. In reality, whether or not it is to be believed depends on whom you ask.
A prospectus announcing the first issue of The New Yorker in 1925 promised that,
As compared to the newspaper, the New Yorker will be interpretative rather than stenographic. It will print facts that it will have to go behind the scenes to get, but it will not deal in scandal for the sake of scandal nor sensation for the sake of sensation. Its integrity will be above suspicion.
(The same document was also where Harold Ross, the founding editor, was first rude enough to say that his new publication would “not be edited for the old lady in Dubuque.” The past hundred years have brought remarkably little change to some aspects of the magazine’s attitude, which remains equal parts tongue-in-cheek, earnest and supercilious. But today, such subscribers are highly desirable.)
True to Ross’s mandate, the New Yorker maintains an obsessive interest in facts, one that can sometimes seem to go beyond any obvious practical advantage. It didn’t take long for the early editors to recognise the usefulness of at least basic stenography. In 1927, the magazine published a profile of the poet Edna St Vincent Millay, “America’s first starlet,” claiming, among other fanciful details, that her father had been a stevedore (he was a schoolteacher). The embarrassment inspired Ross to install a fact-checking department, and since then, checkers have left their marks all over the magazine. John McPhee, in an essay published in 2009, depicted fact-checking as a pursuit bordering on mania. To shore up one important but rickety anecdote of his concerning wartime nuclear reactors, a checker placed calls that “ricocheted all over the United States: from Brookhaven to Bethesda, from La Jolla to Los Alamos.” The chase culminated, moments before the press deadline, in a call to a Florida police department, which the checker enlisted to track down a crucial witness. (He turned out to have gone to a mall.)
Not many pieces require such heroics: the reality is that fact-checkers are busy people, who traffic only infrequently in the dark arts of deep research. Most facts can be checked far more easily, especially with the benefit of the internet, and since there are so many, a checker has to prioritise. When a particular fact turns out to be especially sticky, persistence and attention, rather than any kind of special knowledge, are generally what’s needed. Checkers, of course, are not infallible, and their successes are mostly attributable to hard work and creativity. What is truly extraordinary about having a fact-checking department is that it exists at all. At the time of writing, thirty people work in fact-checking at the New Yorker, almost all of them full-time. It is labour, at scale, that produces accuracy.
Today, with a few pragmatic exceptions, fact-checkers go over everything published by the New Yorker, editing for accuracy, balance, fairness and context. Writers are asked to share their sourcing; checkers review both research materials (books, articles, emails, documents) and original reporting. For complex topics, and as needed for corroboration, they do their own independent research, perhaps conferring with relevant experts. And unless there’s a good reason not to, they get in touch with every person and entity mentioned in the story, and comb through what’s attributed to or said about them.
This fulfills a few functions. If the person cooperates, as they typically do, the checker can verify factual details, including those that appear within quotes. If they disagree with something, they get a chance to comment or correct the record. And if they are angry, well, it’s better to know. (This step is also important in libel-proofing a piece: under US law, a good-faith and thorough effort to discover the truth is a solid defence should you accidentally publish an actionable inaccuracy. No matter how solid your standards are, it doesn’t look great if you didn’t bother trying to contact the person involved.)
Checkers may discover hidden holes in a story, or garner perspectives that ought to be included. Most importantly, perhaps, this process, which is a kind of re-reporting, gives a fact-checker an opportunity to find out the basis of each statement of fact or opinion: is it personal experience, the pages of a half-remembered book, a third-hand rumour, or years of study? The value of a source, whether a person or a document, comes down mostly to their access to information, and to its quality.
Depending on the stakes — are we talking about what I ate for breakfast, or where I saw the crime occur? — and on what other sources are available, a checker may then need to seek corroboration or to do some reporting of their own. Finally, based on all this, they can decide what to say, and how: after a fashion, they decide what the magazine believes to be true.
Truth, in this sense, is sought and rendered, something produced by rigorous inquiry and informed consideration rather than something discovered. Many points, tweaked where necessary, can be stated as fact, but often a checker will want to insert a citation (‘according to…”) or present conflicting accounts. Tone matters, and may be used to indicate the level of confidence: a well-judged assertion may be one that leaves room for doubt. Falsehoods which reveal something about the speaker may have enough value to keep, so long as they are rebutted, but statements that are truly unverifiable, or clearly and unfixably specious, will typically be cut: deciding what not to publish is sometimes just as important as deciding what to keep in. In the landscape of a story, fact-checkers’ trails can often be followed along a path of hedges and denials, but an elegant fix may render the footwork behind it invisible. (Dispiritingly, checking tends to be at its most visible when it goes wrong, as when, despite Der Spiegel’s dozens-strong research department, a star reporter there recently turned out to have fabricated many of his stories.)
Subscribers to the New Yorker, of whom there were roughly 1.3 million at last count, seem to place a good deal of trust in this process. We know that they do because they’re so upset when we get something wrong. (Letter writers’ snide tendency to complain about failures of “the New Yorker’s vaunted fact-checking department” is surely a form of flattery.) Because the New Yorker, like many other publications, trades on its reputation for accuracy, readers can easily feel cheated, even betrayed, when an error slips in. This is not simply a commercial problem. “Trust,” as the philosopher Annette Baier once wrote, “is a fragile plant,” one that can easily be damaged by the kind of increased scrutiny or scepticism that a flaw, once noticed, tends to induce. Once the roots have withered, they can be hard to restore.
Trust is something that journalists ask for. It’s also something that they give. Just as readers learn about the world from the news, so journalists learn from their sources. Another philosopher, Neil Levy, points out that “much — perhaps most — of what we know, we know on the basis of testimony, and (except in some unusual cases) we acquire knowledge through testimony only when we trust speakers.” Most information comes to us from other people, whom we choose, deliberately or without thinking, to believe. As journalists, how and why we make those choices is particularly important. In the same essay, Levy writes that “trust makes us vulnerable,” and if this is the case for a writer, it’s doubly so for their reader. No reporter can avoid that vulnerability, but mediating it is essential to earning and keeping the trust of a reader. Journalists choose whom to trust on their readers’ behalf.
For journalists, as for anyone, there are certain shortcuts to trustworthiness, including reputation, expertise and transparency — the sharing of sources, for example, or the prompt correction of errors. Some of these shortcuts are more perilous than others. Various outfits, positioning themselves as neutral guides to the marketplace of ideas, now tout evaluations of news organisations’ trustworthiness, but relying on these requires trusting in the quality and objectivity of the evaluation. Official data is often taken at face value, but numbers can conceal motives: think of the disputes over how to count casualties in recent conflicts. Governments, meanwhile, may use their powers over information to suppress unfavourable narratives: in Hong Kong, “fake news” laws ostensibly aimed at misinformation threaten free expression; some see the same spectre in America.
While certain categories of information may come to be considered inherently trustworthy, these, too, are in flux. For decades, the technical difficulty of editing photographs and videos allowed them to be treated, by most people, as essentially incontrovertible. With the advent of AI-based editing tools, footage and imagery have swiftly become much harder to credit. Similar tools are already being used to spoof voices based on only seconds of recorded audio. For the average person, this might manifest in scams, but for a journalist, it puts source calls in question.
Technologies of deception tend to be accompanied by ones of detection or verification — cryptographic keys, for example, have long been used to verify identity online, and a battery of companies already promise that they can spot AI-manipulated imagery — but especially at a moment of rapid change, these remain deeply fallible. Though chatbots and AI-enabled search engines promise to help us with research (when a colleague at the New Yorker “interviewed” ChatGPT, it told him “I aim to provide information that is as neutral and unbiased as possible”), their inability to provide sourcing, and their tendency to hallucinate, look more like a shortcut to nowhere, at least for now.
The consequent problems extend far beyond journalism: election campaigns, where subtle impressions can lead to big differences in voting behaviour, seem increasingly vulnerable to deepfakes and inscrutable algorithms. Like everyone else, fact-checkers have only just begun to grapple with the consequences.
In such a landscape, it becomes difficult to know what is true, and, consequently, to make decisions. Trust and naivety can feel uncomfortably close. We live in complex societies, where the media often functions as “the expert system helping people navigate the social and political world.” If this system fails, and nothing takes its place, the consequences look dire. But failure — the endpoint of the story of generational decay, of gold exchanged for dross — is not inevitable. Fact-checking of the sort practised at the New Yorker is only one potential, highly specific and resource-intensive solution, but its relationship to the basic tenets of editorial good practice make it worth examining. It acknowledges the messiness of truth, the requirements of attention, the way we squint to see more clearly. It tells you to say what you mean, and know that you mean it. •
This essay appears in Age of Doubt: Building Trust in a World of Misinformation, edited by Tracey Kirkland and Gavin Fang, published this month by Monash University Publishing.
