Quote:“Uncle Joe” Cannon, whose 1923 retirement set off the last instance of multi-ballot mayhem in choosing a Speaker of the House.

Joseph Gurney Cannon, grand old man of Congress, will retire from public life. At the age of 86, having served 23 terms in the House of Representatives, he feels that he has earned the right to spend the rest of his life in the quiet seclusion of Danville, Illinois. Uncle Joe is something more than a politician with an age-record. He is the embodiment of a tradition, a political theory, a technique of party government and discipline that is fast perishing. He represents the Old Guard in the very flower of its maturity, in the palmy days of McKinley and Mark Hanna, when " a little group of wilful men " did more than make gestures of government; they actually ruled Congress, shrewdly, impregnably, and without too much rhetoric.

Uncle Joe in those days was Speaker of the House and supreme dictator of the Old Guard. Never did a man employ the office of Speaker with less regard for its theoretical impartiality. To Uncle Joe the Speakership was a gift from heaven, immaculately born into the Constitution by the will of the fathers for the divine purpose of perpetuating the dictatorship of the standpatters in the Republican Party. And he followed the divine call with a resolute evangelism that was no mere voice crying in the wilderness, but a voice that forbade anybody else to cry out—out of turn.

On March 4 Uncle Joe will be gone and Henry Cabot Lodge alone will remain to carry on the banner of the ideal. To the American people, however, the senior Senator from Massachusetts must perforce seem a little too genteel, too cold, too Back Bay to serve as an adequate trustee for the Old Guard tradition. They will long for the homely democracy of Mr. Cannon, so often expressed by those homely democratic symbols—Uncle Joe's black cigar and thumping quid.

Quote:The Story Behind the First-Ever Fact-Checkers

Here's how they were able to do their jobs long before the Internet.

At TIME Magazine’s 20th anniversary dinner, in 1943, the magazine’s co-founder Henry Luce explained to those gathered that, while “the word ‘researcher’ is now a nation-wide symbol of a serious endeavor,” he and co-founder Briton Hadden had first started using the title as part of an inside joke for a drinking club. “Little did we realize that in our private jest we were inaugurating a modern female priesthood — the veritable vestal virgins whom levitous writers cajole in vain,” he said, “and managing editors learn humbly to appease.”

Luce’s audience nearly 75 years ago is not the only group to wonder about the origins of fact-checking in journalism, though the casual sexism of the 1940s would no longer fly. Today, especially amid concern over so-called “fake news” and at a time when it may seem inconceivable that checking an article would be possible without the Internet, it remains a natural question: How did this journalistic practice begin?
And, as it turns out, that story is closely linked to TIME’s past.

First Facts

In the years between 1923, when TIME’s first issue was published, and Luce’s speech, journalistic fact-checking had gone from a virtually unknown idea to standard practice at many American magazines. (These days, journalistic practices aren’t necessarily country-specific — Der Spiegel, for example, is known for having one of the world’s biggest fact-checking departments — but that wasn’t the case a century ago, and this particular kind of checking was an especially American phenomenon.)

Of course, well before any separate job of “fact-checker” existed, editors and reporters would have had their eyes out for errors — but it was around the turn of the 20th century, between the sensational yellow journalism of the 1890s and muckraking in the early 1900s, that the American journalism industry began to really focus on facts.

Quote:Research: Fact-Checking: History of Fact-Checking

An early use of the term fact-checker can be found in an ad for TIME magazine in 1938 which mentions the expansion of "its researchers and fact-checkers from ten to twenty-two."  Nancy Ford was the first Time fact-checker and she extensively consulted the New York Public Library Information Desk to perform her work.   By the 1930s, the "checkers" were entirely drawn from young women graduating from college.   Their research work was rigorous and involved the "process of surrounding a story", making sure every detail was correct and incorporated into the final story.  If errors were made, the female checkers were generally held responsible, not the male authors of the piece.

In 1971, after  the women at Newsweek filed a successful  complaint with the Federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against the sex-segregation of the magazine departments,  the TIME magazine research manual was rewritten to incorporate these workplace changes.  The fact-checkers were renamed "reporter-researchers" and  the job was opened to men.  In  later decades, the duties of the checkers gradually evolved: reporters did some of their own fact-checking and the checkers expanded their responsibilities to include reporting.

Fact-checking at other publications

 The  New Yorker has a longstanding reputation for its fact-checking department.  The German newsmagazine Der Spiegel once had the largest and most respected fact-checking operation in the publishing world.   But in 2018 , a celebrated reporter was exposed for fabricating stories which the fact-checkers never caught.