When Fact-Checking Meant Something

What i always say is that I wasn’t a very good checker. I don’t mean I made mistakes—mistakes being, in fact-checking, failing to catch someone else’s mistakes. I mean that the things I checked weren’t serious or difficult, that generally, the bar was pretty low. This was at Tina Brown’s New Yorker in the mid-1990s, a time when the magazine was trying to raise its own heart rate. The idea was to make headlines, not just cultural history. But when we had a piece whose publication might result in a lawsuit or an international incident, or a person’s vindication or ruination, or a significant and unanticipated paradigm shift on a matter of collectively agreed-upon importance, such as the Holocaust or Shakespeare, I wasn’t the first checker anyone thought of.