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Fact-checking is not an easy job in an era of misinformation. In fact, the actor Daniel Radcliffe said that preparing to portray a magazine fact-checker in the play The Lifespan of a Fact made him more nervous than going onstage. In a research stint at the New Yorker, he was tasked with a restaurant review. First, he had to ring up the place of business. After confirming the spelling of the restaurant’s name, he went through the items, ingredients and cooking methods listed in the review. One sticking point was whether the establishment had a ‘Venice Beach aesthetic’, to which the restaurant chef disagreed (he considered it ‘more Mexican than Californian’). Here, Radcliffe replied that he’d never visited Mexico (even though it was later established that he actually had). ‘I just fact-checked a fucking article!’ he said afterwards, in an interview that was subsequently fact-checked by the New Yorker. ‘Nothing I do today will be harder than that.’
In Australia, the Press Council offers standards of practice and guidelines for written material that appears in print and online. The Australian Communications and Media Authority focuses on radio and television communications in particular. Third-party fact-checkers are employed to bring an objective lens, although this responsibility is increasingly delegated to in-house fact-checkers, such as ABC’s Verify.
Such diligence isn’t entrenched in book publishing in the same way.
In Australia, we don’t tend to have professional cold-callers ringing up to make sure every statement is verifiably true in our books. Instead, the industry often relies on authors themselves to do the grunt work of verifying references, cross-checking quotes and tracking down sources.
Fact-checking is not an easy job in an era of misinformation.
In recent years, there have been high-profile cases where authors have got their publishers into hot water. In 2023, Hachette pulled a former police officer’s memoir after discrepancies were pointed out in his account of the Port Arthur massacre; according to Victoria Police records, the author wasn’t stationed in Tasmania at the time. More notoriously back in 2016, wellness influencer Belle Gibson’s recipe book, The Whole Pantry, had hit shelves when Penguin was fined $30,000 over the author’s claims that her diet had helped cure her (fictional) brain cancer—this, on top of the $15,000 the publisher had forked out for a ‘home economist’ to develop the book’s recipes.
Other times, it’s a question of the burden of proof and contextual legalities. Recently, Rebel Wilson’s memoir Rebel Rising was delayed by HarperCollins in Australia and the UK amid potential legal threats over her allegations of ‘asshole’ behaviour by Sacha Baron Cohen on set (allegations Baron Cohen denies). The books were already on the way to bookshops, who were alerted in advance not to put the stock out. (The book has been released in the US, where defamation laws give more freedoms to publishers. HarperCollins Australia say that when the book is released in Australia in the coming weeks, the chapter on Baron Cohen will be printed entirely as blacked-out lines.)
Books are by their nature more intensive to fact-check than journalism, and in the absence of third-party checkers and established codes of ethics for authors (such as the MEAA Journalist Code of Ethics), the industry relies heavily on the trust between writer and editor.
Fact-checking is an important task for any writer. Attributing sources goes hand in hand with fact-checking, and not all sources are equal. The first checkers employed at Time magazine used a colour-coded method for classifying source material. This includes firstly ‘red-checking’, applying red dots to facts checked from authoritative sources like reference books, then black dots for facts verified by newspapers, and finally green dots for uncheckable ‘facts’ accepted on the writer’s authority.
It might not seem important whether a high-profile celebrity has ever been to Mexico or not, but minor details can be the difference between a trustworthy account and inaccuracies that can have untold unintended effects. Writers who get key facts wrong can face serious consequences, including fines and court action. Legal implications aside, there are ethical aspects to fact-checking too. Even small errors may leave a reader in doubt and can undermine the legitimacy of a text.
Minor details can be the difference between a trustworthy account and inaccuracies.
The first word of advice from Fiona Murphy, acclaimed author of The Shape of Sound: ‘Check every fact—even those related to your own life.’ Murphy’s debut blends memoir with observations on the healthcare system, offering an intimate but also extensively researched treatise on deafness, disability and identity. Murphy notes that errors can have widespread and detrimental consequences. ‘I knew that the book needed to be watertight. There is a huge amount of misinformation about deafness and hearing technology that is peddled as fact,’ she says, citing two examples of common falsehoods: that deafness causes dementia, and exposure to sign language stunts brain development. But the diligence paid off, Murphy says, noting that seeing her book on reading lists in schools and universities has made it all worth it. ‘I’m continually contacted by healthcare professionals who have changed their clinical approach since reading the book.’
Debut author Cher Tan also advises, ‘If you can’t verify it, then don’t use it.’ The blurred boundaries between different realities are at the heart of Tan’s new-release essay collection, Peripathetic, which ‘interrogates societal beliefs around selfhood and belonging in a rapidly polarising world’. Tan, a writer and editor, says that extensive research and cross-checking material were crucial to planning the direction of each essay. ‘For each essay, I made a “mind map” of sorts about relevant themes, identifying key points I thought I could explore,’ says Tan. ‘From there, I thought about what I’d read previously that spoke to those points, and looked at those references again to see if new insights emerge, making notes along the way.’ The process helped her deepen the ideas within. ‘After this, I would look up never-before-encountered books and articles speaking to those themes and points, seeing if they would support what I already had, or bring to light what I had missed. A picture would materialise in my head, and I’d try and ask myself how I’d tell this “story” of the picture in writing.’
Tan says she also received help to verify her sources and check quotes from her publisher, NewSouth. ‘There was a project manager and copy editor whose jobs were to help me with this process. If there was something they could not confirm, they would highlight it and I would locate the source so they could verify it.’
By contrast, most publishers require writers to do this kind of work—and this is outlined in their contracts. In the editing of Murphy’s book with her publisher Text Publishing, fact-checking was almost wholly the author’s responsibility—and one she took seriously. Murphy also sought permission to use reference material to avoid copyright infringement. She notes that she found this process of verification and seeking authorisation enriching: ‘Initially, I was daunted by the idea of approaching so many brilliant writers and academics, but it has become one of my more treasured memories of the editorial process. I had so many delightful email exchanges, which gave me a huge amount of confidence during the pre-publication period.’
Most publishers require writers to do this kind of work.
Copyright can be a barrier, so it’s good to be mindful of whether the quotes you are using are in the public domain, free-dealing exceptions like critical review and satire notwithstanding. It’s good practice to check anything published after the 1950s. According to the National Library of Australia, copyright generally lasts for seventy years following the death of the creator. However, this can change depending on whether the creator is known and whether (and when) the work has been made public. (Epigraphs and song lyrics can be an expensive exercise—think $1000 for one line of ‘Wonderwall’.)
Notions of intellectual property can also be tricky if you believe ideas should be freely available to every reader, including writers and researchers who aren’t rich or don’t have easy access to academic institutions. ‘I used [online databases] Libgen and Monoskop to locate copies of books I personally don’t have copies of or can’t afford,’ says Tan. ‘Or I email the publisher to ask for an e-copy (if it’s not too old) so I can crosscheck quotes.’
In terms of keeping track of sources, there are a range of methods and resources that authors use. Murphy says she wished she had known about reference management software earlier. ‘I used Mendeley, which allowed me to tag articles with keywords, create bibliographies, store PDFs and notes,’ she says. Tan uses Slack to streamline the referencing process: ‘When I see a relevant quote, I tend to keep track of them via a personal Slack under the channel #quotes. But it’s quite haphazard as sometimes they end up in a notebook or in the Notes app on my phone. When I was writing Peripathetic, I tried to make a conscious effort to transfer quotes to the Slack.’
Giving advice to emerging non-fiction writers, Murphy says this: ‘Question the source. Make a mess whilst researching but be prepared to tidy it up. Save copies of websites. If you have institutional access to academic databases, cherish it. If you know that this access won’t last—PDF everything, even if you don’t think it is relevant.’
Fact-checking is often a complex process that can reveal layered narratives over time, offering a richer truth than what might be immediately apparent. It also calls into question the relationship between narrator and narrative, as well as the boundary between fiction and non-fiction. Misinformation, plagiarism and fabrication are some dangers that emerge when facts fall through, and the stakes can be significant. The responsibility on the author to check facts and attribute sources is equally high. If that fails—you made it up.
