Recently I saw a meme that read:

“Fact checkers” didn’t exist until the truth started getting out.

That’s not accurate.

Fact-checking has been a standard practice at many American publications for more than a century and even longer at some.

TIME was a recognized leader in the practice when it began hiring researchers in the 1920s to verify the information in the magazine’s articles before publication. Without the internet, they depended on their own reference books as well as the New York Public Library.

Those positions were staffed by women whose jobs also included doing background research to find interesting details and support material for the male writers. By the 1930s, they were called checkers.

It wasn’t until the 1970s, after women at Newsweek filed a complaint with the Federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission over the sex-segregation of the magazine’s jobs, that fact-checking positions opened up to men.

My experience as a writer

When I began freelancing in the 1980s, many of the magazines I wrote for had fact-checkers, and I appreciated that someone was coming along behind me to check my work. I remember getting a call one day from a source I had interviewed a few weeks earlier. “I just got a message from a fact-checker at the magazine,” he said. “Are you in trouble?”

I explained that this was standard practice to assure accuracy of the information the magazine published. After that, I made it a habit to end my interviews with a little speech saying when the article was expected to run and that the source would likely be hearing from a fact-checker before that.

Of the publications I wrote for, some simply confirmed the source’s name, credentials, and gist of their quotes. Others went into greater detail, verifying figures and other points. And then there was the eager intern at a trade magazine who asked me to provide the authority I was using for abbreviating “request for proposal” to RFP. (The editor apologized to me for that.)

With the advent of the internet, increasing political polarization, and growing financial constraints at publications, fact-checking has evolved from a process designed to prevent inaccurate content from being published to a controversial, often-biased activity that has increased public distrust in the media. Sadly, change isn’t always progress.

I’m nostalgic for the days when fact-checking and verification were really just honest fact-checking and verification, and the only agenda for doing it was accuracy.