Bringing the Fact-Checker to a Play About Fact-Checking

In the world of journalism, a fact-checker performs invisible work. No one, save the writer or editor of a story, really notices it. And yet at the country’s top magazines on down to its remaining newspapers, copy desks engage in that tireless task of reviewing stories for a paramount goal: accuracy.

Bringing this work to the literal spotlight is The Lifespan of a Fact, a 90-minute play running through July 21 at Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre. In it, a magazine writer, fact-checker and editor quarrel over an essay’s tiny details, and how they do, or do not, affect the resonance of its bigger themes. It’s essentially a question about the old Mark Twain maxim, writ large: Should you ever let the truth get in the way of a good story?

Linda Houser doesn’t think so. As a 24-year veteran of the San Francisco Chronicle’s copy desk who fact-checks stories daily, her life is a trifecta of clarity, consistency and accuracy. Which I why I decided to bring her along to see The Lifespan of a Fact. Who better to “review” the play than the copy chief at the Bay Area’s newspaper of record? (I knew I’d brought the right person when, just before curtain, Houser mused aloud if “lifespan” should be one word or two.)

The Lifespan of a Fact opened on Broadway in 2018, and is based on the real-life disputes between writer John D’Agata (played here by Elijah Alexander) and fact-checker Jim Fingal (Hernán Angulo) over a magazine story about a teen suicide. With Carrie Paff as editor Emily Penrose, and directed by Jessica Holt, the play takes some liberties while raising broad questions about human nature.

After opening night, Houser and I posted up on Shattuck Avenue in downtown Berkeley to talk about it. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

KQED: First things first. Did you like the play?

Linda Houser: I did like the play! I kind of liked and hated a couple of the characters, by turns, and so it was very thought-provoking.

How true would you say it is to the work that you do, of fact-checking?

At a newspaper, we wouldn’t have something quite so scandalous. In the play, the writer’s an essay guy, a magazine guy, and he’s basically writing fiction. We wouldn’t even check some those details, because it would never occur to a daily newspaper journalist to not have the facts right, or to blatantly disregard them, like he does.

So the very granular detail of fact-checking in this play — that doesn’t come up at a daily newspaper?

I mean, we do check. But usually when we’re checking, it’s a math error, where people maybe forget about a leap year. Was the date wrong, or was the number of days wrong? Was one of those numbers a typo? Adding is a big part of the job. That’s a lot of what we do, and we hammer that out very easily. There’s no arguing, or flying to Vegas.

Was there any part of the play that best illustrated the work that you’ve done for the past 24 years? Where you went, “Yes! That’s what I do!”

I didn’t like the kid at first, the fact-checker, because it seemed like he was really trying to make the story about himself. But then he would make a great catch, and find something really important.

We had a freelance writer a few years ago who filed a feature story. They were quoting an excerpt of something at the beginning, and they said it was Emily Dickinson, or someone like that. And it just didn’t sound right. I checked and it was a Prince lyric. It was the oddest thing ever! We had a good laugh about that one. Like, is it April 1? Because that is ridiculous.

Was there an aspect of the play that was off to you? That made you say, “Oh, come on, it’s not like that at all”?

Well, you know, there were the Triscuits.

Right, the fact-checker really wanted to know if they were actually eating Triscuits.

I don’t know how much of it is the kid going to Harvard. I’ve known some people who went to Harvard and are not that annoying. But I don’t think the Triscuits matter at all, you know?

That’s the central tension in this play, the debate over whether or not to let facts and accuracy get in the way of a larger truth. And I was a little convinced at times that some details didn’t matter as much as the story’s rhythm, or pacing.

I will say, I feel like the writer didn’t really need all the numbers that he seemed to need. Even his own editor thought there was something special about the number four.

Have there ever been times when you’ve taken a fact out of a story because it seemed incidental or unimportant, and then regretted it later?

No. We did have an editor once on the city desk. His motto was “when in doubt, take it out.” I wouldn’t always loop him in, because sometimes there are things that are nice to have in the story, and he would take it out if it didn’t matter.

What about additions? The true story that this play is based on, the fact-checking process went on for seven years, partly because new facts came to light. Have you ever had a stop-the-presses moment over new facts that emerged at the last minute that fundamentally changed the story?

No, but I did get to kill a story once. I was slotting it, which means the editor had read it, and then the rim copy editor had read it. And this freelancer, a good writer and a respected writer, was writing about someone who’d died. It was this writer’s idea that clearly the wife had done it. They cited some vague facts, and then leapt to a conclusion. They did not talk to the wife, or the police.

And it was very juicy for a minute. I was like, “Oh my gosh, she totally did it.” Of course, that’s everyone’s first impression. But then I was like, I know we are the features section, but this is perhaps too much. I checked with my people on the city desk who deal with crime and legal issues all the time. And they said, “Linda, no! We cannot put that in the paper.” So we plugged it with a different story.

We live in an age of proliferating disinformation. Obviously, most of it is out of your personal control. But do you see your job, in its small way, as protecting truth, and by extension, protecting the importance of truth?

Well, we certainly try, but it’s crazy. You can just repeat things, and so many people believe them. You can have AI magnify them and make them bigger. And people, when they see it so much, they’re like, “Well, of course it’s true.” They don’t even know what they’re reading, but it looks legitimate and they believe it, and it isn’t. And then they distrust us because people say, “Oh, the media. The mainstream media.” Like, maybe we are the mainstream media because we have gone to college, and we’ve studied, and we try hard. But they don’t care.

Bring back gatekeepers!

Yikes.

I’m not just pantomiming what you’re saying, I actually think we should bring back gatekeepers.

It’d be nice.

Near the end of this play, the young fact-checker is warning the older editor and writer about this new online paradigm, where you can’t just make things up or fudge facts, because people on Reddit and 4Chan and Twitter will seize upon it and publicize that it’s wrong, and it will be a giant scandal. And I had this very depressing feeling that, while that may have been true at the time, it’s not now. A hundred people could correct the facts online and it would not matter.

Yeah. I liked the fact-checker. He was very eager. I thought he was too eager, but he was right.

Last question: No one really sees the work you do. What would you like people to understand about your job as a copy editor and fact-checker?

Really, I’m just reading the newspaper. It’s a little different now with the website, but back in the day, I got to read the paper before people could read the paper. And I’m really just another reader. If something looks iffy to me, it will look iffy to the audience we have. And I want to fix that before it gets out there. There’s less of us now, of course. We have the shrinking staff that everybody has. So it’s a lot of pressure, and maybe it’s underappreciated, but it is important.

‘The Lifespan of a Fact’ runs through July 21 at Aurora Theatre in Berkeley. Details here.