In 2012, The Slant interviewed the feminist writer on the art of fact-checking.
Rebecca Traister is a contributing writer at Salon and The New York Times Magazine, where she regularly writes brilliant and bold essays on the intersections between gender, politics, and media. She got her start in journalism as a fact-checker for The New York Observer. In 2010 she wrote Big Girls Don’t Cry (Free Press), a riveting read on how the wild 2008 presidential campaign expanded the range of possibilities for women in politics and society. She gives
The Slant a writer’s view of the fact-checking process:
Tell us about an egregious mistake a checker caught.
No! It’s so bad and embarrassing that I cannot even bear to admit what it was.
Ever use an off-the-record comment?
I always and under every circumstance honor an off-the-record request made prior to a specific statement or a whole interview. Of course, for some valuable piece of information or insight, I’ll beg and wheedle to get someone to put it on the record. But if the answer is no, it’s no. It gets slightly trickier when an interview subject retroactively takes something off. (i.e. if she or he says something and then says, “That was off the record.”) There are people who would argue that technically, you can ethically justify using it anyway, but it’s a tough question. You have to weigh each situation differently: consider your relationship with the source, how crucial the statement is to the story you’re telling, what your gut feeling about the intention of the interviewee is, and how media savvy they are (i.e., are they media novices, in which case you give them more leeway, in my view. The pros should know better.)
Should quotes be verified?
I have rarely had fact-checkers confirm quotes. I spent years as a fact-checker at The New York Observer, and we didn’t check quotes. At Elle, where they do, I’ve handed over tapes and transcripts, but it feels like a slight violation.
Don’t get me wrong — I’m always thrilled to be fact-checked; I consider it a great collaboration. But because of the way I was trained, I consider the interviews to be outside the purview of fact-checking. In fact, when I hired a researcher to check Big Girls Don’t Cry, he was very surprised–and maybe a bit horrified–that I didn’t want him to check my tapes against the quotes I used in the book.
Tell us what makes a great fact-checker.
Mostly engagement with the material. That doesn’t mean they have to find it scintillating, just that they care about the process of reporting, that they feel invested in making sure it’s correct. Fact-checkers are reporters, and reporters have to get interested in whatever they’re reporting, whether or not they find it personally diverting. So that engagement leads to an investment in whether or not the work delivers accurate information to readers. And that I think leads to the other great fact-checking qualities: thoroughness, attention to the tiniest detail, a keen sense of where to confirm information, and good instincts about whether certain sources pass the smell test.
What are you working on now?
I’m in the midst of writing a book about unmarried women scheduled for publication by Putnam in 2013.
Traister’s work has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Elle, and Vogue, among others.
Comments