You see, it surprises me that anyone thinks that’s surprising. My only experience of fact-based publishing is in academic publishing within my humanities field, where I’ve published monographs and edited collections with one of the big university presses and other big, reputable publishers, and also been a peer reviewer for the main journals in the field and for various presses.
My first big monograph was read and acquired by the committee of that university press, and it was peer-reviewed by three anonymous reviewers when I submitted the MS. But, bluntly, it couldn’t have been ‘fact-checked’, because at that point the only expert in the precise subject I had written about was me, after years of research. Anyone wanting to check whether my author did the thing I said he did in whatever year, based on a letter in an archive, would have had to pay someone to look it up in that archive. And do exactly the same for all of the hundreds of references throughout, which took me years to put together. My editor wasn’t a specialist in my specific field. The peer reviewers would have been people who’d published on adjacent topics working for a token fee. I peer-reviewed a biography of a famous writer for a big US academic press a couple of years ago. It probably took me a week to read and write my report on the multiple problems with the MS, for which I was paid $200.
Obviously commercial publishing is different. You don’t get an advance for academic publishing, print runs are tiny, royalties are tiny, and you do it because the research component of your job requires you to disseminate your research, and to participate in peer-reviewing etc. But there’s a similar problem in that it simply isn’t possible for anyone to fact check every assertion. It would take as long as the original book did to write.
I don’t think Wifedom is a good comparison, as, as a feminist recovery of George Orwell’s first wife, it got up a lot of people’s noses, and the majority of the corrections were from the children of Orwell’s friends saying things like ‘I have a letter that proves he wasn’t in fact unfaithful to Eileen with my mother’. The publisher was fending off potential lawsuits in correcting such things. The central tenet of the book (Orwell was a gifted writer, but in many ways a misogynist wanker) was never queried, except by people getting sniffy about ‘applying the standards of today to a marriage in the early 20thc.’
You might say that PRH’s due diligence should have included some paperwork that established the reality of the court case that lost the Walkers their house, sure. It’s possible they were shown some medical letters referring to Moth’s illness as a box-ticking exercise, but didn’t check them against the supposed timeline. But no one in commercial publishing is going to check how realistic their rate of progress was, look up their children’s SM for things that don’t fit, or interview former neighbours like an investigative journalist. (Or indeed, as posters on Tattle increasingly do to say influencers are misrepresenting their lives.)