When fact-checkers fall, who guards the truth?

National Review has declared the professional fact-check dead. I take the headline seriously — not because I ever placed unlimited trust in any particular class of arbiters, but because the question it leaves unanswered is one I spent much of my life turning over: an uninformed citizenry is not merely inconvenienced; it is ungoverned in the only sense that matters.

I was never naive about the press. I wrote, in my darker moods, that a man who reads nothing but newspapers is better informed than a man who reads newspapers at all — meaning I understood that partisanship and error were old companions of the printing trade. Yet I also wrote, and I stand by it, that were I forced to choose between government without newspapers or newspapers without government, I would choose the latter without a moment's hesitation. The press — imperfect, contentious, sometimes reckless — is still more friend than enemy to liberty. Any institution that promises to discipline factual error inside that press deserves at least a fair hearing before its burial.

The trouble, as National Review suggests (and I mark this as inference from the lead, since I have only the headline and a single line before me), is that professional fact-checkers accumulated the authority of neutral arbiters while sometimes behaving as partisan ones. Power, I have always found, does that. It is not unique to governments or banks; it is the nature of any concentrated judgment to serve, over time, the interests of those who exercise it. That is not an argument for ignorance — it is an argument for distributed scrutiny, for many watchmen rather than one licensed guild.

What concerns me most is the vacuum. If institutional fact-checking is dying, the question is not whether to mourn it but what fills its place. History teaches that the choices are few: an educated citizenry capable of individual discernment, a competitive press that corrects itself through rivalry, or — most dangerous of all — a sovereign, public or private, that declares itself the sole custodian of permissible truth. The first two I welcome; the third I regard as tyranny wearing a librarian's coat.

The remedy, then, is not nostalgia for the fact-checkers who have gone, nor celebration of their going. The remedy is what it has always been: universal public education rigorous enough to produce citizens who can weigh evidence themselves, a press market open enough that no single voice can dominate it, and a public jealous enough of its own reason that it refuses to outsource judgment entirely to any institution — governmental, corporate, or journalistic. Malo periculosam libertatem quam quietam servitutem — I prefer dangerous liberty to quiet servitude. The same holds for dangerous, contested, imperfect information over the quiet management of thought by those who know better. Let the citizens think; trust that on the whole they will think well enough, provided we educate them and keep the channels of inquiry open.