“Our readers must be made to understand that life is a complicated thing of negatives and positives.” For two decades now, the words attributed to the Soviet magazine editor have been replaying in my mind — perhaps once a month on average, at times more than once a day. “Our readers must be made to understand that life is a complicated thing of negatives and positives.”

         As at dozens of similar magazines owned by wealthy corporations, at the magazine I worked for the fact-checkers were not to get involved in trying to establish — pragmatically or, heaven forbid, philosophically — which of the claims made in the articles were or were not factually accurate. Nor were fact-checkers to solicit the opinions of experts who were skeptical of the investment and consumer advice offered in magazines whose profits and very existence depended on advertisements from investment and consumer-product companies. We were not supposed to talk to any experts who had not been interviewed in the course of the preparation of the article we had been assigned.

          Our job was to make sure of three things: that the experts who the writers claimed to have interviewed had indeed been interviewed; that to back up every claim made in the article there was one sufficiently titled, degree-d or well-known expert, or two in the case of taxation issues; and that any quotes or opinions attributed to a given expert indeed represented something that this person was willing to go on record as believing. We filed neat lists of the names and titles of the people we had spoken to, when we had spoken to them and via what telephone numbers, and which points they had “confirmed”. This record was kept on file in case of law suits being brought against the parent company. Should a reader, for example, become impoverished or miserable as a result of following the magazine’s advice, our files would reveal that, even if the magazine’s information had been wrong, the corporation could not be held liable. The magazine had truthfully communicated what verifiable experts believed. (The experts accepted this responsibility in return for the publicity and the pleasure of having themselves listed in the magazine as experts.)

Smile continued