At The New Yorker, the fact-checking department has traditionally been seen as a journalistic gyrostabilizer. Is it wobbling a little?

If so, it would not be too surprising. Editor Tina Brown has taken the stately yacht of The New Yorker through maneuvers more typical of a cigarette boat. Where the old New Yorker sought to be timeless, she strives to be topical; where the pre-Tina magazine sought to be free of current trends, Brown is a divining -- and lightning -- rod for what is hot (see "Tina's New Yorker," CJR, March/April 1993). All of this brings new challenges to the fact-checkers.

For many years the magazine's editors, followed by the fact-checkers, worked off the top of a pile of material, a pile in which articles entered at the bottom and, to a large extent, politely worked their way up. Just how different things are now might best be illustrated by an article on tensions in the West Bank by Robert I. Friedman -- "An Unholy Rage" -- that was rewritten in the wake of the massacre at Hebron, although "in the wake" may imply a more leisurely approach than was the case. News of the massacre reached New York on a Friday morning, and the article -- on which the fact-checking process had not begun -- was checked by Friday's late-night closing, despite the fact that Friday's sunset in Israel, around noon in New York, marked the beginning of the Sabbath, when observant Jews don't answer the phone.

Given such challenges, Brown has tried to strengthen the checking department. Since her arrival in 1992, the number of fact-checkers at The New Yorker has doubled to sixteen -- half staff members, half free-lancers. Martin Baron, the head of the department and a twenty-year veteran there, says that, although major stories have gone through under extraordinary pressure, the department has adhered to what he describes as The New Yorker's standard: "To come as close as we can to verifying independently every fact in each issue of the magazine."

Still, recent gleefully nasty stories in the press have focused on mistakes that have slipped past the magazine's fact-checkers: "Say it Ain't So, Tina" (Newsweek), NEW YORKER'S QUESTIONABLE QUOTES (The Washington Post), MEA CULPA IS LATEST TALK OF THE TINA (New York Post). The stories were prompted by a letter to the editor -- the letters-to-the-editor column is one of Brown's innovations -- from Court TV's Steven Brill, an aggressive complainer about articles written about him. Brill wrote that a Talk of the Town piece about an editorial meeting at Court TV that appeared in the January 24 New Yorker contained quotes that "are embellished or just plain false." The writer declined to talk to CJR about the incident, and the precise sequence of reportorial, editorial, and, as the fact-checkers put it, informational events is not completely clear. But in the end, The New Yorker publicly apologized, and, while not admitting that any quotes were fabricated, did concede that "errors in reporting, checking, and eding found their way into the story."

The fact-checker on the piece was "gone, just vaporized," in the words of one department member. "There were five errors in two and a half columns of copy, and I just was not comfortable with going ahead with the next piece with that checker," says managing editor Pamela Maffei McCarthy.

Immediately after the Friday closing the following week, a meeting of the entire department convened in what is known as Siberia, a remote section of The New Yorker's midtown office. Reactions then, and in the following weeks, ranged from checkers who said they understood the. firing to those who called for a work slowdown to protest it. "Some said, 'Let's close the place down,'" one fact-checker recalls.

Instead, the department held a meeting with managing editor McCarthy. Comments at the meeting were, by mutual agreement, off the record, but the checkers submitted a written statement to McCarthy, arguing that, although the checker fired for the Brill episode "did not perform his task at the most successful level," the checkers "still find ourselves unable to conclude that [he] deserved to be fired." The statement continued:

The checking department works extremely hard and extremely long hours often while editors and others go home and leave pieces in our hands. We cancel plans and reschedule our lives for the sole purpose of protecting the magazine's reputation m which we do and have done time and time again quite successfully, often with extreme effort.

We all feel personally hurt by the firing of our friend and colleague. As a result of this decision, we all now feel extremely uneasy about the possibility that any one of us might be fired for any piece we check. This fear can only serve to lower our morale and affect our work.

Martin Baron hastens to point out that this isn't the first time New Yorker fact-checkers have been let go. And the magazine's executive editor, Hendrik Hertzberg, told interviewers that The New Yorker has admitted to "something above 300" mistakes in the past. Significant errors were often acknowledged in a floating errata column B variously called the "Department of Correction," the "Department of Correction and Amplification," and the "Department of Correction, Amplification, and Abuse" B or via private correspondence. As one long-time department member recalls, "They would write a private letter, saying, 'We're sorry. We didn't mean to imply you were a pedophile. Yours sincerely, The New Yorker.'"

Those genteel days are over. One of the reasons, many in the fact-checking department feel, has less to do with new time pressures than with the nature of the subjects the magazine now treats -- organizations and people who, as three fact-checkers put it, are "more press savvy," are "more litigious," and "tend to be in the hot seat already." Some members of the department also say darkly that under Tina Brown the editing of The New Yorker has become "addicted to spin."

The magazine is working to establish new approaches to checking, especially of quotes. Some checkers report that they are being urged to listen to reporters' tape recordings.

Meanwhile, with tension in the department running high, checkers have been taking no chances. One asked Art Garfunkel last fall whether he had -- as a Talk of the Town writer had written -- gesticulated nervously with his hands during an interview. Then the fact-checker went on to double-check, asking the singer if he still had both arms.

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