NBC News political reporter Jane Timm has made a career out of fact-checking politicians’ statements. While she also covers campaigns, voting rights and election policy, she feels fact-checking has the highest stakes.
“Journalists are human, people make mistakes, but fact-checkers really can’t make mistakes,” Timm says. “In eight years of doing this, I can think of one correction we’ve had to run, and it was just an editing error. It wasn’t a fundamentally wrong fact-check.”
Watch the video above to see how Timm fact-checked the only 2024 presidential debate between outgoing President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump and read her best advice for fact-checkers below.
Why does journalism need fact-checkers?
Fact-checking is an important part of journalism. At this point, everyone has to do it. It’s helpful in major live events to have one person tackle it, because other people need to listen with a different kind of ear in a different way. They need to process how the debate is going to impact voters. We need someone to call balls and strikes a little bit.
Early in my career, I worked as a fact-checker for magazines. How fact-checking used to work is, you printed out the page of the magazine, usually on legal-sized paper, and you took a pen and you crossed off every single word that was correct and every letter in a proper name that was spelled right. I did that when I was 22 and looking to make cash and break into this industry.
When I moved into a full-time job here at NBC and was writing more, those skills were indelible in my brain. It’s still how I fact-check big features that I write — I print them out and I cross off every word and every letter to make sure that I’m getting it right.
I started doing it more in terms of politics in 2016 because, frankly, I was just tired of listening to things and going, “That’s not right.” We started a blog in 2016, the last 100 days of the election, fact-checking both candidates. Every single day, we published something, “Here’s what’s being said, and here’s what’s right or wrong.
What are your go-to sources when you fact-check? Do you use Google first?
You’re going to Google when you hear a simple question. “There were no military deaths under my administration.” All right, I know a time frame, and I can type in “service member, fallen death, military,” keywords to check the clips.
I always check the NBC archive. What have we written about this? Really simple things like inflation, I can go straight to the government data. We’re always checking numbers. Most politicians are going to get numbers [or] their own personal histories wrong when they’re talking.
We collect a stable of experts, people on different sides of the political spectrum who study things. We’ll talk to somebody at a left-leaning think tank and a conservative think tank and put those ideas together, or call an expert in a nonpartisan think tank. Tax experts, professors at universities are often some of my sources when I’m trying to understand something.
One of the coolest things about this fact-checking operation is that I get to call up Pulitzer Prize-winning economists and ask them to explain policy to me. There’s nothing cooler than getting to talk to some of the best experts in the world and then share that information with readers.
What advice do you have for journalism students?
Write stories that you want to read and chase stories that you’re interested in. Almost every beat that I have successfully written as a journalist has been something that I was really interested in. Fact-checking was an awkward, nerdy little habit that I had, and now it’s a vital part of journalism.
Read NBC News’ live blog of the 2024 Trump-Biden presidential debate and Timm’s fact-checking article about the debate.
