Jonah, let me push back a bit. I agree with you and Remnick in theory, but The New Yorker is coasting more on its reputation for fact-checking than on the reality of its actions. When Sy Hersh wrote his piece about the Office of Special Plans, in which I worked as a Council on Foreign Relations’ International Affairs Fellow several years back, I was there for the pre-publication fact checking. The New Yorker sent a list of questions which folks answered the same day. In many cases, the Pentagon folks corrected outright factual errors. Nothing from the fact-checking response made it into Hersh’s piece. Perhaps the facts got in the way of the thesis. Hersh is prone to trying to fit square pegs into round holes, and his editors let him get away with it. The looseness of the fact-checking process surrounding Hersh and his tendency toward single-sourcing is something which other New Yorker writers privately grumble about.

In another case, Jeffrey Goldberg called me when he was doing a profile of Douglas Feith. I declined to help, as I prefer to focus on the politics in Iran and Iraq rather than inside the Beltway. Goldberg said something I can’t repeat here and slammed down the phone. In his next article, he took a potshot at me, presumably because I did not help him as a source, and attributed something to me inaccurately which he evidently dug up on some blog. I guess it’s that old Washington adage: Either you’re a source or you’re a target. No big deal, but the fact-checkers never bothered to call before publication. And so the magazine ended up simply laundering bad information. I’d argue that today, the editing and fact-checking at The New Yorker is no better than that of any daily newspaper.