What’s a Walrus? A Beast, Actually

LAST NOVEMBER, WE received a letter from a grade five student in New Kent, Virginia, asking for advice. The child was beginning work on an “editorial” and wanted information on how to “save the walrus from extinction.” He meant the wrinkled, tusked-and-whiskered mammal, not this organization.

There is a lot to love here. First, the charming analogue quality of the act. The letter was printed, crisply folded, slipped into an envelope, and dropped into a mailbox. No email address was provided, ensuring our reply would travel by slow technology. Second, undergirding the letter—and this, in our era of AI summaries, ChatGPT, and Reddit—was the sense that there is a brick-and-mortar place that could respond to the question. Implicit in that was something rarer: the patience to wait for an answer.

The question was not a small one. The walrus isn’t endangered but has been flagged as “vulnerable” largely due to climate change. As ice disappears, herds are forced onto land in larger numbers, leading to deadly stampedes, stress, and overcrowding. Industrial activity in the Arctic—shipping, oil and gas exploration, military traffic—adds noise, pollution, and habitat disruption. So, while the species isn’t on the brink of extinction, its margin of safety is rapidly narrowing.

But, of course, that led me to think about the marine animal that I lead, and all the bad weather arrayed against us: collapsing trust in media, the economic fragility of independent journalism, the dominance of algorithms that thrive on conflict. Together they form a climate that treats facts as optional. Our promise to readers is that we will hold the line. We insist facts are out there, they matter, and we can get them for you.

We commit real resources to this. We run a fact-checking department, helmed by a head of research, with one full-time checker, a deep bench of freelancers, and a fellowship program devoted almost entirely to checking. They do more than prevent errors from appearing in our reporting—which they do brilliantly. They make possible a national newsroom that, to survive, has to win and defend a reputation for explaining the country to readers.

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A lot of our writers, even seasoned ones, think this process is fairly straightforward, even mechanical—consult what’s online, verify against other bits of reporting. And sometimes that’s enough. The problem is there’s a lot of information out there, and much of it can be wrong. Studies are misread, complex situations flattened into distortion, allegations circulated without context. AI can now recycle those errors at industrial scale, to the point they become consensus.

That’s the environment we work against. We invest in original research, in reporting that provides a freshness that much-parroted facts cannot. We push our writers for that distinctive texture, that quality of newness, whether the subject—as in this issue—is permissive parenting, lucrative baby eels, or the career of Canada’s first AI czar.

And once in a while, our efforts speak to someone directly. We sent our young charge all the resource material we could find. I don’t know whether his editorial earned an A. I don’t know if he wants to be a writer, or a scientist, or something else entirely. All I know is that for a few days in November, a fifth grader believed there was one place in the world that had the answers. And that’s the reason I come to work.