With most people in media busy pivoting to podcasting or outsourcing staff jobs to freelancers, fact-checks often end up assigned to overburdened editorial assistants or inexperienced interns. Sometimes, this invaluable step is skipped altogether.
Not so at The New Yorker, which employs 22 dedicated fact-checkers, five of whom discussed their jobs last weekend as part of their employer’s festival. While they’re most famous for their work on every piece of journalism the New Yorker publishes, the magazine’s fact-checkers also check short stories, poetry, cover art, and cartoons.
Take this cartoon:
Can you find anything wrong with it, besides the fact that “nagging wife” jokes aren’t all that funny? Look closely. Think about it before you read on.
The car is driving on the wrong side of the road.
Here’s another cartoon, which also happens to also be sort of tasteless and un-funny:
Found anything?
Penguins don’t live in the arctic.
One more — this time it’s a poem by Charles Simic
You definitely won’t get this one, but you can still try.
Male spiders don’t mend webs. Apparently, in the arachnid world, that’s almost always a female spider’s job. Mr. Simic didn’t seem to care about his fact-checkers recommendations, though, because the published version of the poem uses “his.”
While the only people to notice the error were probably the half-dozen arachnid experts who happen to read New Yorker cartoons, this does illustrate something all of us in media should keep in mind: facts don’t matter if people don’t care.