When Fact-Checking Meant Something
July 24, 2025 at 12:33AMI’m forever fascinated by the work of journalists and newsrooms, by the peculiar processes through which events become facts become stories. The New Yorker fact-checking department has, of course, long been a source of awe and intrigue, a font of surprising anecdotes about the particular and the detail-obsessed. Still, Susan Choi’s account of her time as a checker for the magazine is an exceptional contribution to the micro-genre of fact-checking essays: less an homage to the hard-won detail, more a piece of quiet praise for the shared pursuit of truth and the surprising intimacy such searches can yield.
I don’t remember much in specific detail from the hours of reading and making phone calls. What I do remember is sitting in the midday dark of a Times Square movie theater surrounded by solitary men in long coats, confirming the quoted lines of dialogue in Anthony Lane’s review of Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls. I remember Joan Didion bringing me hot tea in very fragile china cups that would rattle alarmingly in their saucers as she made her cautious way toward me through the apartment she shared with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, who had not, as the magazine’s regular writers did, sent the department his source. I remember being flown to Washington, D.C., to check a profile of Ted Kennedy by Elsa Walsh, who had just given birth and who had also not sent us her source. In the middle of my sifting through it, a housekeeper summoned me downstairs, where I took a seat on one side of a long, shiny table at the head of which sat a small man who clearly had not been expecting company for lunch: Bob Woodward, Walsh’s husband.
It’s unsurprising that these are the things I remember, and Kelley’s novel is entertaining because it also leans heavily on the fact-checker’s oddball encounters. But to dismiss these incidents as worthy of remembrance and narration is to risk missing something important about them—that their obvious distinction is how they were all interactions containing something intimate, something vulnerable. I knew what those moviegoing men in their long coats were up to. I sensed the effort it took Didion to carry that cup. (Like my mother, she had multiple sclerosis.) I was eating with Walsh’s famous husband while elsewhere in their house, she nursed their newborn child. Somehow, my fact-checking job had slipped me into the envelope of another human’s most personal realm.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/07/23/susan-choi-fact-checking-new-yorker/
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