Checking the Facts in the World of Trump

I guess I picked the right year to take up fact-checking.

I had been in journalism for a very long time. I had run a national magazine, overseen news operations at newspapers in many cities, covered Washington during the Watergate era, written columns about the media for a national newspaper. But this assignment was new.

Sure, I had written columns about the phenomenon of news outlets checking the assertions of political figures and ascertaining which were true and which were false. And I was a fan. For too long, I felt, news operations would run stories saying X said this, Y said that — and leave it there. And leave readers, viewers and listeners completely unenlightened about what was true.

I have long believed that taking that next step — figuring out where the truth lies, and reporting it — was an important public service. As long