Illustration by Josh Holinaty,
Updated 17:48, Apr. 8, 2021 | Published 14:34, Apr. 7, 2021
A t nineteen, I moved to New York City for my first magazine internship. I was hired as a fact checker, and at the time, I knew little about the practice; it hadn’t yet gained the popularity it now enjoys, with regular headlines about “Fact-Checking the President in Real Time.” I interpreted fact-checking literally: journalists report facts, sometimes they make errors, and fact checkers clean everything up before the story is published.
This was roughly the process that awaited me at
Harper’s: every day for three months, I sat with three other young journalists, meticulously researching sentences that would appear in the upcoming issue. Once we had investigated a fact to satisfaction, we pored over our work with an imperious senior editor, who would interrogate us about nuances and details. I was thrilled by the rigour of the process. When our work was done, the published product would be empirically incontestable. Over the next few years, I worked as a freelance fact checker for various publications, and I eventually became head of research at The Walrus for two years, until 2019—a job in which I took on a similar role to that of the imperious