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Fact Checking is Your Job
It always was. Always.
You can tell how much attention I pay to news these days. When a few of my Facebook contacts grumbled about Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement that Meta was ending its fact-checking programs, I had no clue what they were talking about. I had to research the subject.
That is, I had to fact-check my contacts’ claims.
Having learned what the furor was about, I stifled a metaphorical yawn. If there’s anything modern life teaches us, if there’s anything history teaches us, it’s what my dad taught me when I was a teenager:
Believe nothing you hear and only half of what you see.
This old adage is attributed variously to Benjamin Franklin, Edgar Allen Poe, and others. American journalist and short story writer Damon Runyon rang a clever tune on that theme in his 1933 short story “The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown”¹:
“Son,” the old guy says, “no matter how far you travel, or how smart you get, always remember this: Someday, somewhere,” he says, “a guy is going to come to you and show you a nice brand-new deck of cards on which the seal is never broken, and this guy is going to offer to bet you that the jack of spades will jump out of this deck and squirt cider in your ear. But, son,” the old guy says, “do not bet him, for as sure as you do you are going to get an ear…
