In 2016, the concept of a “post-fact era” entered public consciousness. Much was written about what a future without facts might hold. But how do we define this era of facts that was coming to an end? And when exactly did it begin?
In 1923, co-founders Briton Hadden and Henry Luce created TIME magazine, the first weekly news magazine in the United States. Unlike the daily newspapers at that time, TIME prioritized accurate reporting over speed of distribution—TIME was initially called FACTS magazine. Curious about the first fact-checked news, I read every issue of TIME from its first year of publication. Confirmed, reliable facts was the magazine’s primary product, and TIME promoted its innovation through advertisements within its own pages.
The series, Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind, chronologically presents 28 prints made from digital scans of archival microfilm of photographs of TIME pages that feature advertisements promoting their own fact-checked reporting. Some advertisements fill the entire page. Others are smaller, revealing snippets of TIME’s reporting (including questionable facts by today’s standards).
The prints show visual marks of time (dust, scratches, tears, and pixelation) visually distorting the 100-year-old news, drawing attention to the transformation of media from offset printing to digitization. The work gestures to the prevalence of distortion in the news and the inherently subjective process of selecting which facts to present. (Columns like “The Cabinet” and “The British Empire” regularly span multiple pages while columns titled “Women” and “Negroes” are only a few sentences long, if included at all.)
Contradicting their own founding principles, many of the advertisements rely on historical and literary myths (e.g. Homer, Shakespeare, Alexander the Great) to describe the value of fact-checking. In Volume 1, No 9, TIME suggests that the magazine is akin to the Greek goddess Ariadne who gave Theseus a magical thread to lead him out of the labyrinth after defeating the Minotaur.
Indeed, TIME’s first reference library contained only three books—the Bible, Xenophon’s Anabasis, and Homer’s Iliad. (For anything else, the first fact-checkers had to visit the New York Public Library.) Hadden and Luce even adopted a Homeric cadence as the magazine’s “TIMEspeak” writing style. (The New Yorker, an early competitor, mocked TIME’s writing as “backward ran sentences until reeled the mind.”)
Like the tradition of oral bards, modern journalism has been a form of myth-making since its inception: certain stories circulate through time and across cultures while others transform or disappear altogether.