The daily life of a New Yorker fact-checker The eighteen fact-checkers (twenty-one, if you count the three who are devoted to online work) who make sure the articles […]

The eighteen fact-checkers (twenty-one, if you count the three who are devoted to online work) who make sure the articles published in the New Yorker magazine every week are watertight, stormproof and generally impervious to squalls of queries from the great American reading public sit at L-shaped desks positioned on the east side of the thirty-eighth floor of the World Trade Center, in Manhattan.

“I had to ensure that every date, every name, and every quotation in the piece was correct… There was a debate that lasted late one night about what species of bird a local guide had pointed out.”

The desks are made from a wan synthetic wood, but this fact isn’t always immediately apparent, because many are piled high with drafts of pieces, books, microphones, week-dry coffee cups, thermometers, dictionaries, maps and the occasional document marked “Top Secret” (mine also is littered with a two volume set of the Lloyd’s Register of Ships from the nineteen-sixties, nail scissors, sweet-wrappers and an orange earplug stuck with a drawing pin, but we won’t go into that).

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The checker’s granular approach

A checker’s desk speaks to his or her work, and an archaeology of the items upon it points to past pieces they have worked on. The note, acted upon long ago, to contact an activist at a tribal people’s rights organization that hangs off the left corner of my computer screen, for example, is a reminder of Jon Lee Anderson’s magisterial piece on the Mashco Piro, an isolated indigenous group who live in the undulating rainforests of Western Peru.

As one of the two fact-checkers on the piece, I had to ensure that every date, every name, every quotation, every fact-based opinion—and every opinion-based fact—in the piece was correct. When Anderson told the brutal story of the rubber barons’ colonization of the region, I made sure it tracked with the history books, when he reported the intricacies of his boat-ride on the Madre de Dios River, I called one of his traveling companions, an ethnobotanist at the head of the Amazon to make sure everything was in the right order.

There was a debate that lasted late one night about what species of bird a local guide had pointed out. My colleague, using Peruvian phonebooks, tracked down a local preacher who was intent on converting the Mashco to Christianity.

Fact-checking is an art less practiced at U.K. magazines and papers. Some journalists will point out that subs do much of the work checkers do in the U.S. But, while a sub’s role is key in the publication process, the efforts at verification performed by the checker are far more granular. Checkers – unburdened by the necessity of scouring a piece for grammatical and typological errors – spend much of their time tracking down sources, calling sources’ friends and colleagues, going through databases, and trying to reach whomever is mentioned in a piece. ‘Humanising the process of journalism’

My desk is full of the detritus left by such efforts. Somewhere in it are the letters I once exchanged with a prisoner in Oklahoma. My Facebook feed occasionally lights up with pictures of an Iraqi medic I messaged with during the siege of Mosul. A blue post-it reminds me not to miss a dinner with an author I once spent eight hours on the phone with, checking a profile, and have since become friends with. Calling sources allows us to speak to people before a piece is published and to make sure that they’re not entirely blindsided by the appearance of a piece that a writer may have called them about months ago. We call the inevitable freakouts “controlled explosions,” or sometimes “source remorse.” But in the end, as Peter Canby, my boss and an almost forty-year veteran of the magazine, has said, “it humanizes the process” of journalism. Checking in the age of Trump

As attested to by the fresh pile of papers that has almost enveloped my desk lamp, fact-checking in the age of Trump and “fake news” has become even more complex.

A recent profile of a Trump cabinet member required hours on the phone with aides in Washington and sources in Russia and the Middle East.

When a giant swathe of the population is essentially convinced that the news media is a baroque conspiracy between the New World Order and journalists, facts, and errors, have the potential to develop into flashpoints. The checker’s work is to have done some of the advance work, scrutinising the facts from multiple angles before they are presented to the reading public.

Nicolas Niarchos is a fact-checker and writer at The New Yorker