Hey, Fergus. Hi, Tyler. Thanks so much for being here. My pleasure. So people likely saw one of three headlines about Trump attending the U.S. Open. Either he was booed. I think that was what was reported by The Guardian. He was cheered. That was what was reported by Fox News. Or it was a mix of both. I think the New York Times went with something kind of diplomatic like Trump was met with mostly booze at the U.S. Open. And so all of these things could technically be true at the same time. But depending on your feed, you'd only see one of these things. And then depending on your worldview, you might only accept one of these things as the actual truth.

And so what do you think that this says about how we experience facts and truth today?

You can have three headlines all saying a variation of the same thing in some ways contradicting each other.

And yet there's also evidence supporting each and every one.

I think what it says is that facts which are something that people tend to think of is really

singular and extant in the world, something that, things that exist by themselves, are actually

often a matter of interpretation or selection or focus or what you choose to look at and how you choose to look at it.

People want to think of facts as something that are in themselves fair, something that are in themselves accurate or balanced.

And I tend to think maybe this is something, you know, I'm kind of too pilled by having spent 10 years in the New Yorkers fact-checking department.

But, you know, this is the material that we work with every day, factual material.

And you can do a lot with information that is accurate depending on what you choose to use.

That's Fergus Macintosh, who leads the fact-checking department at The New Yorker.

Over the past decade, questions about what counts as a fact, who decides, and how much

institutions can be trusted have only grown more complicated.

At the same time, Donald Trump has continued to bend data to his political needs,

sometimes ignoring it, sometimes suppressing it,

and more recently, trying to control it outright.

I wanted to talk with Fergus about how we understand facts and data in 2025,

what it takes to verify them, what it takes to check them,

and how Trump's second term has reshaped the relationship between truth, information, and political power.

This is the political scene. I'm Tyler Foggett, and I'm a senior editor at The New Yorker.

So you've worked in fact checking for a decade now, and you oversee our fact-checking department.

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