Fact Checking Becomes Obsessive

by Ted Rall

My job, both as a columnist here and elsewhere as a political cartoonist, is anti-journalism. To be sure, I'm interested in truth, but not in objective truth. I'm devoted to the presentation of my own particular point of view, which is overtly biased, prejudicial and virulently opinionated, in the hope that it resonates with Americans who appear in their local paper only in the obituary section. I may throw a bone to my opponents now and then, but that's merely to make my arguments all the more convincing: Well, Rall seems fair; I'll give him a chance.

Well, forget it; opinions are by definition unfair. If you're looking for any kind of Truth here other than My Truth, stop reading and skip to Alexander Cockburn.

Unfortunately, Stephen Glass has ruined life for us anti-journalists. In case you haven't heard, Glass was the twentysomething wunderkind whose prose for publications like George, Harper's and most notably The New Republic turned out to be largely composed of lies. Among Glass' more amusing exploits were his feature pieces about Young Republican orgies and a nonexistent Manhattan investment firm whose bankers supposedly paid homage to Alan Greenspan at a Santeria-like shrine. The following week's NR was choked with letters to the editor about the imbroglio; several subscribers expressed confusion at the magazine's decision to fire Glass. The pieces were obviously over-the-top satires that only a moron would take literally -- weren't they?

When, in late June, Boston Globe columnist Patricia Smith confessed to inventing quotes, along with the people being quoted, in four of her columns. Globe ombudsman Jack Thomas says that the paper "continues to be suspicious" of 48 additional columns dating back to 1995.

"A reading of all 52 unverified columns reveals no pattern for her deceit, no persistent political agenda, not even a clue as to why she would make up characters and quotations other than the possibility that she was lazy, intellectually indifferent, or, as she said in her column of apology, because of her ambition to achieve too much in too little time," Thomas wrote in the paper's July 20 edition.

Some fact-checkers follow a paint-by-numbers approach exemplified by those working for the NY Press, an alternative weekly.

"Did you really have a wart that nearly killed you?"

"Yes."

"This really happened in December of '83?"

"Yes, it did."

"Did it really get written up in a medical journal?"

"That's what my doctor said."

Others, like those for Link, a free monthly distributed on college campuses, insist on written citations for every quote and every reference. But fact-checking has gone beyond nit-picking to sheer lunacy.

About a week into the Glass story, I got a call from a fact-checker for Civilization. Cartoonist Jules Feiffer, who edited the magazine's special issue on comics, had mentioned me among several other up-and-coming artists in a chart depicting the 103-year history of American comic strips.

"How do you spell your name?" she asked me.

"What's the matter?" I replied. "Don't you trust Jules Feiffer to get my name right? Or do you think he's plotting to destroy me by intentionally misspelling my name in a national magazine?"

"I have to check everything," she said.

"Is there an actual article about me?" I wanted to know.

"No, just your name is on the chart." Come to think of it, how did she know I wasn't lying about the spelling of my name, or that I wasn't an assassin answering the phone while chopping up the real Ted Rall's body into bite-sized morsels?

Where will this madness end? In light of the recent CNN-Time retraction of a story alleging the use of nerve gas against American deserters during the Vietnam War, I can certainly understand why news organizations are redoubling their efforts to get the story straight. But nowadays getting it right means never taking a writer's word for anything, no matter how trivial a story may be.

A few days ago, a fact-checker from the newly reconstituted Egg, a magazine that's bundled with P.O.V. (truth-in-journalism statement: I'm a P.O.V. staff writer), called to verify a fluffy feature piece I'd written about cats. Among other things, I had asserted that my cat possesses a vocal range of one full octave.

"How do you know?" the fact-checker inquired suspiciously.

"He's my cat. I hear him all the time."

I could hear the fact-checker breathing, getting ready to dial my editor's number to rat me out.

I had no choice. May PETA have mercy on me, I picked up my cat -- he hates being separated from the earth from which he draws his strength -- and held him tightly while his meows moved up the B-minor scale.

"Sounds like an octave to me," the fact-checker said, and hung up.