Recent weeks have seen a flurry of conversation about factchecking in the publishing industry. Two high-profile authors have had their work’s accuracy questioned by their sources, leading to something of a reckoning in the book world. Many people are asking how these inaccuracies could have happened, but those familiar with the publishing process say they aren’t surprised.
Last month, Sally Kohn’s book The Opposite of Hate debuted to much media attention and celebrity endorsement. However, shortly after the book dropped, Call Your Girlfriend podcast co-host Aminatou Sow headed to Twitter to dispute a quote that had been attributed to her in the book and said that Kohn, a political pundit who appears on CNN, “admitted … that she did not go back to factcheck sources in her book”. In response, Kohn released a statement that said, in part: “I … regret that I did not double-check before using Aminatou’s quote and attributing it to her.”
Just two weeks later, Amy Chozick released her book Chasing Hillary. Chozick was the New York Times reporter assigned to cover Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2016. Clinton’s daughter Chelsea tweeted at Chozick about what she said were factual inaccuracies in the book, and noted that no one ever contacted her to verify them. The points Chelsea disputes are a joking aside about receiving a keratin hair treatment, and another about popping champagne on election night. For her part, Chozick says she hired a factchecker and referred to her book’s author’s note, which reads: “This book is a work of nonfiction in that everything in it happened. But this is not a work of journalism, in that the recollections, conversations and characters are based on my own impressions and memories of covering Hillary Clinton and her family.” Chozick’s PR representative at HarperCollins did not return a request for comment.
These controversies have raised concerns about the accuracy and standards of published books. Similar concerns were circulated earlier this year when Michael Wolff released his book about Donald Trump’s White House, Fire and Fury. But what anyone who has never published a book might not realize is that the bar for factchecking books during the editing process is low, if it even exists at all. Not only that, it’s common for publishers to never have a conversation with authors about the issue of factchecking and to assume that getting it right is entirely on the author.
“On a fundamental level, a publisher has to trust that authors will perform due diligence when it comes to verifying and sourcing facts, and that they will not knowingly misrepresent events or individuals in their work,” explains Hannah Wood, an editor who has worked in publishing industry since 2008. “This is the essence of the author warranties and indemnities section of a contract. Boilerplate language varies, but it generally affirms that the work is original, that it’s not libelous and that it’s accurate.”
Wood says that as the publishing industry stands now, constraints make it nearly impossible for publishers to be able to dedicate the kind of time and financial resources that would be required for a full factcheck on every book they publish. So while publishing houses provide copy-editing, proofreading and legal services who keep an eye out for issues of libel and intellectual property. Factchecking is usually outside the scope of what they can feasibly do.
“In the broad sense, factchecking is going back and checking on the sentence level for specific facts like stats and descriptions and that sort of thing,” says Brooke Borel, author of The Chicago Guide To Fact-Checking. “But also higher level, ‘Do all of these facts add up to something that’s true?’”
And while magazine journalism is usually thoroughly factchecked by a third party, “books are almost NEVER fact checked,” science writer and former factchecker Erin Biba said on Twitter (though she notes in a follow-up email that technically, her tweet itself hasn’t been factchecked). “Publishers don’t pay to factcheck books so writers have to pay out of their own pockets and that’s rarely possible. When I was a factchecker I rarely used a book as a source because they were often inaccurate and contained errors.”
Borel agrees with Biba’s assessment. “I, as a factchecker, have learned: don’t necessarily trust books,” she told the Guardian. When Borel was publishing her first book, Infested: How the Bed Bug Infiltrated Our Bedrooms and Took Over the World, she said she couldn’t afford to hire an independent factchecker, so she had to do it herself. “But it’s really hard to factcheck your own work,” she says.
As humans, we tend to be biased against our own work. “It’s very tempting when you’re going through your own work to not go through thoroughly every single line, and double-check every single thing because it’s really tedious,” explains Borel. “It’s much easier to look at a sentence and say, ‘I know that’s true,’ and not actually go back and check it against the original sourcing or to not push back and question yourself about your framing.”
Not only that, hiring an outside factchecker can be expensive and something that many authors cannot afford. The Editorial Freelancers Association cites rates at $30-$40 per hour. “If an author thinks they might want or need an independent factchecker, negotiating an allowance or accommodation for that upfront as part of their publishing deal is a smart move,” says Wood. “Even if a publisher agrees to pay 50% of the bill, that’s a big contribution.”
But, as evidenced by Chozick’s experience, even hiring an outside factchecker won’t make your work bulletproof. And looking at the facts being disputed in Chasing Hillary – a hair treatment and champagne consumption – it might be easy to ask why they’re such a big deal. This was an argument being made when Wolff’s book Fire and Fury dropped earlier this year: if the overriding themes are correct, who cares if the details aren’t?
But Borel argues that factchecking is about more than simply what is written in the book itself. “Those small details really matter because when people see that there are errors even in these sort of small details, they start questioning the larger thesis,” she says. “But even those small mistakes that are not earth shattering, and aren’t thesis shattering, and aren’t going to open you to a lawsuit, you’ll lose reader trust, and then the actual important message that you’re trying to get across may be lost as well.”
A factchecker likely would not have helped in Kohn’s case, as hers seems to be more of a disagreement between a writer and a source about whether that source was ever on the record, and whether sources should be allowed quote approval. And, if Chozick’s author’s note is to be believed, it was her independent factchecker who failed to run the content about Chelsea Clinton by her. But with so many examples of high-profile books whose facts have been disputed in such a short period of time, it might be time for the book publishing industry to take a look at its standards and consider whether there might be a better way going forward.