They're the conscience of Vanity Fair; at Forbes they take apart a writer's copy line by line; and at Smithsonian they'll spend two weeks sifting through a writer's file until they're sure everything checks out.
They are fact-checkers, the truth squad of the magazine world.
"Speaking as an editor, fact-checkers are often the bane of my existence because they are so thorough," says George Hodgman, deputy editor of Vanity Fair.
Don't tell them profits are up by one-third, if profits are really up 38 percent; don't say a company has 25,000 employees when it really has 24,473. And, don't ever say a fact came from another magazine or newspaper.
"We're not allowed to read it in the New York Times and use it," says Kasia Moreno, chief of reporters at Forbes, the bi-weekly business magazine. "Other papers and magazines are not a source for us. I'm not singling out the New York Times, but what if they made a mistake."
Fact-checkers inhabit their own place in the magazine hierarchy. Writers get the glory and awards that come with the well-told tale. Editors stand on the Olympian heights, directing their publications like the captains of mighty ships. Fact-checkers are like dogged insurance company actuaries, toiling over every little detail.
The research department is the backbone of this magazine," says Hodgman. "It is the central nervous system. The fact-checkers save us every month, at least from embarrassment."
Every time a publication hits the newsstand, it puts its reputation on the line. Errors, from egregious to minor, are maddening reminders that even the best system can fail. Yet, rarely is a magazine's good name damaged as happened last month at the New Republic.
On May 18, the magazine published "Hack Heaven," a behind-the-scene look at the dealings between computer hackers and companies they threaten. The story, written by associate editor Stephen Glass, turned out to be bogus. Glass, a rising star at the weekly, used forged notes, a phony Web site, phone lines and other deceptions to get around the magazine's fact-checkers.
His editors then checked his story about a monthly meeting of the Commission to Restore the Presidency to Greatness. It, too, was false. Before it was all over, Glass, 25, was fired, and other publications were scrambling to review what he had written for them. Editors of the New Republic wrote an apology and explanation in the June 1 issue.
People in the magazine world paused and took notice. Editors wondered: "Could it happen here?" People recalled the shame that fell on the Washington Post when Janet Cooke's 1980 Pulitzer Prize winning account of an 8-year-old heroin addict turned out to be fiction.
Glass had made a career of deception at the New Republic. His fall was a spectacular, embarrassing disaster for himself and the magazine that employed him. Other publications he wrote for, including Harper's, Rolling Stone and George, have reviewed his work. George has said it plans to apologize for quotes Glass fabricated in an article on Vernon E. Jordan.
"There's no gloating on my part about what happened to the New Republic," says Jim Kelly, deputy managing editor of Time magazine. "If I draw any lessons from this, it is to be extra careful about any stories that jibe with my more cynical view of how the world works."
Relies on writers
Time handles its fact-checking in much the same way as newspapers, largely leaving the duty to the individual writers. That's a marked change from 20 years ago when the weekly newsmagazine had phalanxes of fact-checkers.
"The magazine has shifted the responsibility for the accuracy of the report much more to the person who should have it all along, and that is the writer," says Kelly. "Ultimately, any publication is as good as its journalists. And a journalist who willfully wants to do something dishonest for his newspaper or magazine has a good chance of getting that done, if he's committed to it."
Glass succeeded until Forbes Digital Tool, the on-line magazine for Forbes, started looking into his May 18 story and could not confirm what he had written. His coverup was on a scale of sophistication far beyond what usually comes into the world of fact-checking. Because of the tacit agreement between writers and their publications, fact-checkers usually concern themselves with names, dates, places, numbers.
Small mistakes
"Nearly everything has some little mistake," says John T. Sellers, chief of news desk research for U.S. News & World Report. "A college might have been a university. It's not like they're big mistakes, but if somebody reads about it and knows, it can really lower the magazine's esteem."
U.S. News, a weekly, has four full-time staff members, two half-timers and two part-timers dedicated to fact-checking. Armed with the writer's file of sources, they go over the details. The idea is not to re-report the story, but to make sure what's in the story is accurate.
"There have been stories that we didn't run, sensational stories that did not run because they were single-source stories," says Sellers. "Once or twice a story has had some underpinning fact that was wrong that canceled the whole story, but that's very rare."
In some cases, a source might claim to have come by information firsthand, when actually it came secondhand or, even worse, from another publication -- and that publication was wrong. Newspapers, those daily miracles that try to capture a day's events, are fairly reliable sources for much of the world, but not at Forbes.
Going to the source
"We have to go to the original source," says Moreno, head of Forbes' research desk. "How do I know it's true unless I have it from the company or from the company's documents?"
Forbes has 25 people dedicated to checking facts; there, they are called reporters. For every issue the reporters get two to four stories of varying lengths. Again, the writer has to hand over everything used in writing the story.
"It's not enough to just say you got it from a document. You have to have the document," says Moreno. "No fact to me is too trivial. In a way, everything has a meaning."
One writer mentioned that the handshake originated in medieval times as a way of knights showing they did not have a weapon. The fact-checkers went to work. They called history departments, pored over books. Six hours later they had a handful of explanations, but no definitive answer. Forbes dropped the reference.
"We very often will spend half a day on half a line in a story," says Moreno. "It is very time-consuming, very labor-intensive and very hard. And it can be very irritating."
The people in this world of fact-checking come from all walks of life. Moreno graduated from the Columbia School of Journalism and came to Forbes 10 years ago. Many of the magazine's reporters end up as writers. Sellers, of U.S. News, was a philosophy and math major.
Many of Smithsonian magazine's nine researchers, called assistant or associate editors, majored in journalism, art history, English and history.
"Most of the job applicants who write to me say they want to get into editing, but they may not be ready for that," says Sally Maran, chief of research at Smithsonian. "It is a career job here. It isn't a stepping stone."
At Smithsonian, fact-checkers spend the better part of two weeks digging into the monthly's stories. They'll call the writer's sources to double-check spellings of names, go over the books writers cite as primary sources. Even with all this scrutiny, an occasional mistake gets through.
Readers know
"We have discovered that with a circulation of 2 million, there is an expert out there on any subject who will see it and let us know," says Maran. "We are the Smithsonian and if we do make a mistake the letters that we get say, 'I'm shocked that this error has appeared in a Smithsonian magazine.' "
At Vanity Fair, the 14 to 18 fact-checkers who work on each issue practically re-report the story. They're as bad as Ken Starr on the prowl. They want everything, tapes of interviews, notes, documents. They'll even watch a video mentioned in a story.
But at Vanity Fair, as at all publications, the most rigorous diligence doesn't save them from corrections.
Pub Date: 6/15/98