Early newspaper printers had more interest in opinion and polemic than objectivity. There was little premium on facts—readers wanted the news, but they wanted it slanted. This began to change with the advent of wire services, where space was precious. In 1854, Daniel H. Craig, the head of the Associated Press, sent out a circular to his agents detailing a request for only “material facts in regard to any matter or event”—in as few words as possible. “All expressions of opinion upon any matters; all political, religious, and social biases; and especially all personal feelings on any subject on the part of the Reporter, must be kept out of his dispatches.” Wire reports couldn’t afford to expend wasted verbiage on opinion or local idiom—they needed to distill newsworthy content to its bare minimum. Doing so was a good business: the Associated Press packaged its content as the raw material that local newspapers could fashion into their own opinion and spin.
Facts sped up the rate at which news could be produced and consumed. This was a double-edged sword, since it led to an increased fear of “honest inaccuracies,” as Ralph Pulitzer, publisher of the New York World, explained in an address at Columbia University in 1912. Soon after, the World established its Bureau of Accuracy and Fair Play in an effort to reduce the number of errors in an increasingly complicated system of correspondents, writers, editors, and layout editors. Its work was mostly retroactive, focusing on catching deliberate fakery and printing apologies rather than fact-checking material before it went to print.
In 1923, Briton Hadden and Henry Luce revolutionized the role and purpose of facts. Their fledgling publication—Time magazine—would gather up other outlets’ work and edit it into bite-size reports and commentary. To ensure before publication that every printed word was objectively verifiable, they added another major innovation: a research department, or what we now call fact checking. (The working title of the magazine was Facts.) Editor John Shaw Billings crowed in 1933 that “We can ask what dress Queen Mary wore last Thursday and have an answer in twenty minutes.”
This method of chasing down even the most minute details was not without its critics. When a Time fact checker working on a profile of Peter F. Drucker, the management consultant, asked what kind of dog he had, Drucker described his senile, half-blind, and lame beagle simply as a “hunting dog,” which the checker entered into her notes. The writer of the profile then changed “hunting dog” into “ferocious German Shepherd,” leading Drucker to conclude that Time’s fact-checking system was one where “the writer does not really understand the facts, and the researcher does not really understand the story.”