Ta-Nehisi Coates, JD Vance and the casualties and causalities of fact-checking
When the burden of fact-checking falls upon readers, not authors or editors, accuracy and truth are the victims
Ta-Nehisi Coates at the 2019 Miami Book Fair. Photo by Getty Images
It’s rare that a letter to the editor is newsworthy, but that’s the case with a letter in The New Yorker about a review of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book, The Message, which repeats the oft-repeated claim that Holocaust reparations funded the displacement of Palestinians.
What’s remarkable is not just that this incendiary — and untrue — claim made it into the pages of The New Yorker, but what it says about how facts are treated in contemporary American culture.
“Parul Sehgal, in her review of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Message, writes about how, in his 2014 essay ‘The Case for Reparations,’ which argued for restitution to the descendants of enslaved Black Americans, Coates invoked German reparations to Israel after the Holocaust as a model,” writes Geoff Kronik, of Brookline, Massachusetts. “He now acknowledges that they allowed Zionists to displace some 700,000 Palestinians, forbidding them to return to their land and property.”
“I wish that Sehgal had investigated Coates’ assertion more thoroughly before repeating it,” Kronik adds.
“Wish” is a good word here. Sehgal is a prominent critic who previously wrote for The New York Times, and the letter then lays out the facts that Kronik wishes she should have checked.
“The Reparations Agreement between Israel and the Federal Republic of Germany was signed in September 1952, and took effect in March 1953, some five years after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and its displacement of Palestinians,” Kronik writes.
“By implying that there is a direct connection between German reparations to Israel and the displacement of Palestinians, Sehgal and Coates create a causality that ill serves both Palestinians and Holocaust victims.”
But wait — who, exactly, should check the facts, and take note of their implications?
A book was published by a major publisher, but the fact-checking of nonfiction books is, according to book contracts, the writer’s responsibility, and not the publisher’s problem. Meanwhile, The New Yorker, with its vaunted fact-checking department, somehow did not adequately check a claim about the hot topics of Palestinians, Israelis and the Holocaust.
In today’s America, in case you have not noticed, checking the facts is now — wait for it — the reader’s responsibility.
Even librarians say so.
“Popular nonfiction books are not routinely subjected to fact-checking before publication,” the Oberlin College library explains. “While egregious errors may lead to a lawsuit, correction, or retraction after a book is published, as a general rule, the burden of tracing facts to their source and confirming their accuracy falls on readers.”
The reader looks stuff up
So, as a reader, I decided to take on that “burden” and learn a bit more. In Coates’ blog, he details the research he did.
“The spine of ‘The Gigantic Dream’ is the 10 days I spent in Palestine. Yasmin El-Rifae and Omar Robert Hamilton, under the auspices of the Palestine Festival of Literature (Palfest), hosted the first half of my trip, paying for my travel, meals, and lodging,” Coates writes.
“My hosts were activists and writers with their own ideas and politics but they exerted no undue influence, nor required that I do anything beyond a public panel in Ramallah. Nevertheless, I cannot say I left uninfluenced. On the contrary, they changed my life.”
When I started out as a reporter, I was told I was not allowed to accept anything from a source — not a dinner, and certainly not a trip. At the time, remaining “uninfluenced,” to use Coates’ word, was considered paramount. And I spent a lot of my time double-checking numbers and quotes.
That’s why I was astonished when CBS moderators Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan opened the lone vice-presidential debate by announcing they wouldn’t check facts. Instead, they said their job was “to provide the candidates with the opportunity to fact check claims made by each other.” So, while verifying facts in books is the reader’s problem, in the debate, it sounded like the responsibility to fact-check JD Vance was on Tim Walz.
How, I wondered, was the listener who was not a complete news junkie supposed to know if what either said was a lie, if even prominent journalists were not allowed to call a lie out?
Part of me was relieved they said so, because it’s easy to miss that it’s getting easier to accept the illusion of truth as truth.
I would not have known that nonfiction books were not fact-checked had I not gone through this process myself, and it has changed how I read and teach. Years ago, when I wrote a piece for a newsstand magazine, the fact-checking included verifying the positions and degrees of those I quoted. When I interviewed mutual fund managers in my first job out of college, I had to record the conversations. But when I wrote a complex nonfiction book, the responsibility for fact-checking was solely mine.
And facts are expensive.
Science and health writer Maryn McKenna told NPR in 2019 that she paid $10,000 to fact-check her book Big Chicken. She said “the publisher ought to be able to afford it because they’re expecting substantial revenue from these books. It really makes one wonder whether accuracy, as a value, is something that’s really top of mind for publishers or whether there’s a separate calculation going on about sales volume that accuracy and veracity doesn’t really intersect with.”
Believing what we want to believe
The urge to believe what we want to believe is powerful. And it sells books.
Surely, there are many who want to believe that Palestinians are paying for the Holocaust, and that Holocaust reparations funded God knows what. It was hard to miss the graffiti desecrating The Wiener Holocaust Library in London, the world’s oldest Holocaust archive, where the word Gaza, capitalized and in red paint, was defacing the “Exhibition and Reading Room” sign.
The graffitied sign is now part of the antisemitism exhibition.
There are also apparently some who want to believe that Democrats fund after-birth abortions, as President-elect Trump put it in a debate.
The question is whether writers who write about this stuff have an obligation to point it out.
We are living in an age when unverified narrative rules our lives. Social media statements, which are not fact-checked, are taken by many as fact. And they can create “causality,” as the letter-writer in Brookline puts it. That is dangerous.
And something else keeps striking me as students quote Instagram propaganda accounts in their essays. Social media is comfortable with one single source, whereas journalism traditionally insists on multiple sources for a story.
This aspect of social media has infected every part of the writing world, as well as the political world. It’s now OK to make claims, not check them, and have them repeated in book or magazine form, in the most prestigious venues in the country.
And that not-checking makes it easier for complex situations to appear less so — and that’s how we have both writers and politicians asserting that they “immediately” understood something.
While there has been a lot of criticism of Trump for his lies, I believe we also must criticize ourselves. We have become OK with debates that let the fact-free run wild. We put books with lies about easily verified historical events on the bestseller list. We then review them and don’t do a quick search for facts, mainly because they confirm what we want to believe.
Readers like Geoff Kronik of Brookline, Massachusetts, seem to be our last defense against the anti-fact front. The librarians tell us so — as they offer links to guides from The Craig Newmark School of Journalism on how to verify facts at home. (Oberlin’s library suggests three questions: Is there a clear source for every discrete fact, statement, or claim? Is the source reliable? Are the conclusions the piece draws from the facts reasonable?)
These days, a “nonfiction” book may be compelling, but it may contain fiction. A “review” may not review the facts. A “debate” may be a statement of lies, with no objection.
All might fail the library’s three-question test.
The gloss and glamour and television lights — not to mention the hordes of social-media followers — cover it all up. As voters and readers, it’s worth remembering which checks and balances are still maintained, and which are up to us to enforce.
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