How to Fact-Check History

The flood of information spilling across social networks into classrooms has led to cries for more “fact-checking,” but what exactly is that? How do you do it – especially if you’re trying to check something that happened decades ago?

In this video, Joe Hogan, head of fact-checking at Retro Report, answers those questions, and explains why fact-checking is a needed skill today, whether you’re making a video, writing a news story, or just trying to stay informed.

“History is full of lessons,” Joe says. “And to really understand those lessons, you have to understand what actually happened.”

Joe’s job is to make sure that happens. He verifies every claim made in a Retro Report video to ensure it is accurate; if it isn’t, it’s corrected. And he pursues his craft with the skills of a prosecutor making a case in court.

If someone claims that Donald Trump was sworn in as president on Thursday, January 17th, 2017, wearing a blue tie, Joe checks every claim in that sentence: the month, the day, the year, the ceremony, that Trump was in fact there, and was being sworn in as president. And, yes, even the color of his tie.

Joe evaluates every claim in every Retro Report that way, whether it’s made by the producer writing the script, an expert commenting in an interview, or a date on a piece of historical footage.

And if that footage claims it’s showing a picture of the Detroit skyline in 1956, Joe will examine other pictures and footage to make sure that was in fact how the Detroit skyline really looked in 1956.

Fact-checking historical events can pose a challenge, especially at Retro Report, which often uses archival material to context current events, so they can be better understood. But every claim, old or new, still must be checked.

To do that, Joe tries to get as close to an event as possible. He reads newspaper accounts from the time, talks to people who were there, consults reliable histories, even talks to historians themselves, to learn as much as he can about what happened and why. All that gives him a bank of expertise that helps him understand the history around an event and verify the claims being made about it.

This may seem like a lot of work but there’s a lot at stake.

In 1995, a researcher at Princeton University predicted that by 2000, the U.S. would soon be overrun by “super- predators,” incorrigible criminals, many of them young black males.

The media picked up on the idea, and soon states across the country were passing laws to crack down on juvenile offenders,

Unfortunately, the researcher later admitted his predictions were dead wrong, but by then the damage was done.

“The idea of the super-predator lasted,” Joe says. “And led to a lot of very stringent laws and policies being passed that ultimately contributed to our current very big problem of mass incarceration.”