As a fact checker, he fights against Donald Trump's fact makers

His girlfriend, who left him for an academic, mocked him as "Mr. Encyclopedia." A woman he met in a bar described him as "the bland man." A third woman, with whom he fell in love and whose name was Sylvia, simply called him "fact-checker." With a hyphen, without an article. He himself, whose name we never learn in the novel, correctly describes himself as uncommunicative, overly controlling, and voyeuristic. He lives a lonely life in New York, talks little, and drinks too much.

The fact checker is the main character of Austin Kelley, who himself worked in this capacity for years at the New Yorker, a magazine that employs an entire department of people like him. A fact checker, the fact checker tells us in his novel "The Fact

Checker» deconstructs every text he is presented with in order to then reconstruct it.

First, he reads the article and underlines all information with different colored pens. Red for quotes, gray for background, blue for other sources. Then he gets to the details. He checks whether all names are spelled correctly, all dates, times, and places are correct, as are all descriptions. Even quotes are authorized for accuracy, although the author should have already done so. The New Yorker even has the cartoons and poems checked for their accuracy.

Check accuracy.

One-sided, manipulative reports that ignore relevant facts also sometimes appear in the New Yorker. But Austin Kelley likes the magazine's high standards, as he says in a Zoom conversation. They have a lot to do with "the fact that it often produces very long texts and still wants to be sure that they are factually accurate."

Kelley enjoyed working there, a corrector in the service of accuracy. Kelley has since become an author, writing for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the New Yorker, among others.

Nevertheless, he does not believe that the checkers harbor any resentment towards the writers, even though the latter are the only ones mentioned in the text. He knows several former colleagues, he says, "who prefer fact-checking to writing because they are more involved in the process."

interested in a link that leads to an article.

When we meet the fact-checker in his novel, he's checking the portrait of a CIA agent who died in Afghanistan. He asks the widow how big the rug in their home is and exactly what color it is. And whether the couple really lived in Chevy Chase, Maryland. With questions like these, the fact-checker works his way toward the most painful of them: Did the widow know her husband was having an affair before his death? "I knew," says the widow, even if she couldn't admit it publicly.

The fact-checker provides several examples in the novel of everything he has had to check, some of which border on the bizarre. For example, he calls basketball player Shaquille O'Neal to find out how he had the tattoo on his stomach spelled, whether it was partly in capital letters, with or without an apostrophe. He asks actor Tony Curtis, who appeared with Marilyn Monroe in Billy Wilder's comedy "Some Like It Hot," whether he named his cat Marilyn after the actress. And the actor gives him an unsolicited digression about his love life. Kelley says that he recorded the phone calls with O'Neal and Curtis himself for the "New York Times."

Yorker».

The fact-checking of "Mandeville/Green," as the text is called internally, was invented for this purpose, based on the respective author and his or her subject. In this case, it is about the vegetable market at Union Square in Midtown Manhattan. The text seems harmless, even though the fact-checker knows that this author, to stay with the botany topic,

tends towards the floral.

Such writers are internally labeled "oozers." While editing, the fact-checker becomes interested in a woman whom the author describes as "interesting," and whom he quotes as saying that "nefarious business" is taking place at the vegetable market. The fact-checker wants to know more, visits the market, and finds the young woman, named Sylvia. He tastes her home-grown vegetables.

tomatoes, starts a conversation with her and gets involved with her in a way that will occupy him for the rest of the novel.

Austin Kelley sets his book in the spring of 2004, a year after American troops attacked Iraq under the false premise that Saddam Hussein's regime was stockpiling nuclear weapons. Kelley says in an interview that the principle of presidential lies was already apparent at that time. He also avoided

want to write his novel with Donald Trump as president because his handling of fake news would have dominated the narrative: "Trump, social media, artificial intelligence and the internet in general have created a completely different environment for information."

This makes his former profession irreplaceable at a time when the US government is notoriously spreading lies, and internet media outlets like X and Facebook have given up on filtering out false claims or conspiracy theories. In Donald Trump's first major speech to Congress alone, in which he spent an hour and a half praising himself, the Washington Post found over two dozen statements by the president that were lies or based on false assumptions.

Nevertheless, such checks always come too late and are barely noticed. They also seem to change nothing about Trump's appearances and his policies. Quite the opposite: The fact-checkers themselves are increasingly coming under suspicion of ideological bias, with Trump and his Republicans accusing them of ideological blindness.

How does Austin Kelley assess this development? He believes that the fact-checkers are always late with their corrections on current issues is a consequence of their diligence. And that they themselves have come under suspicion of manipulating facts has less to do with the fact-checkers than with the political pressure exerted on them.

Kelley ignores the dubious role that activist fact-checkers have played in recent years on issues like the coronavirus or Joe Biden's health. But it's certainly true that Donald Trump and his supporters have peculiar ideas about facts. "Since the era of Donald Trump, contradictory facts have been interpreted as equal," says Kelley. "Instead of believing those facts that can be proven through argument."

An unforgettable example of his observation was the famous statement by Trump’s then advisor Kellyanne Conway

in January 2017, shortly after his first election as president.

She presented "alternative facts" to the facts presented by the opposing side; at the time, the focus was on the attendance at Trump's inauguration, which was noticeably smaller than Barack Obama's. What no one could have foreseen back then was that Donald Trump would continue to govern according to this principle: The facts belong to me, and all who contradict them are liars. Therefore, the president does not need

Fact checker: He is a fact maker.

Austin Kelley: "The Fact Checker." Atlantic Monthly Press, 244 pages (currently only in English)