What You Can Do

When to Let Someone Else Do the Checking

Do the arithmetic on checking everything yourself and it collapses immediately. A serious verification of one contested claim—finding the primary document, reading it, working out whether it says what it is being made to say—runs from twenty minutes to a week. Nobody has that for the fifteenth item in a feed, and the fact that you do not is not a personal failing. It is the reason the profession exists.

So the real question is not whether to trust institutions. It is which decisions you make once and reuse, and which you make fresh every time.

Make the Source Decision Once

Judging a single claim is expensive and does not transfer. Judging a newsroom is expensive once and then pays out on everything it publishes for years. That is the trade the whole system runs on, and it is why the ninety-second check aims at the publisher rather than at the sentence.

An hour spent working out whether an outlet has a corrections policy, who funds it, and whether it has ever published something against its own interest will do more for you than an hour spent litigating one headline. The output of that hour is not “this outlet is right”. It is “this outlet has the machinery to be caught when it is wrong”, which is a much more useful thing to know and a much more checkable one.

What a Desk Has That You Do Not

• The documents. Not the article about the documents. When the Panama Papers landed, reporters spent a year working through 11.5 million files, 2.6 terabytes of them, before publishing a word.
• Time paid for in advance. A reader gets minutes. A desk assigns weeks, and can decide the story is not ready.
• Lawyers. Publishing an accusation about a powerful person is a legal act. A newsroom’s caution about wording is not timidity; it is somebody who has read the law going through the sentence.
• A name on it. A byline is a person whose career is attached to the claim. An anonymous account risks nothing and can be replaced by tomorrow.
• An obligation to correct. Which is the one you can audit from outside, and the reason it gets its own piece.

None of this makes a newsroom right. It makes it accountable, and accountable is the property you can actually verify from where you are sitting.

How to Audit a Desk in One Sitting

The Trust Project, an international consortium of news organisations led by the journalist Sally Lehrman, publishes eight questions worth borrowing whole: do you know who is behind the news; who made this; is it news or opinion; what is their source; how was it built; do they know your community; who is missing from the story; and does the site listen to you. An outlet that answers those in public has decided to be checkable.

For fact-checking organisations specifically, there is a shorter route. The International Fact-Checking Network runs a code of principles with five commitments—non-partisanship and fairness, transparency of sources, transparency of funding and organisation, transparency of methodology, and an open and honest corrections policy—and signatories are assessed by external reviewers rather than self-certified. The list of who is currently verified is public, and it includes organisations whose status has lapsed. Checking whether a site claiming to fact-check is on that list takes about fifteen seconds.

If you want the whole method taught properly rather than summarised, the News Literacy Project is a nonpartisan nonprofit that has been building exactly this curriculum since 2008.

When Not to Hand It Off

Delegation has failure modes, and they are predictable enough to name.

• When the outlet has a stake. A newspaper reporting on its own owner, a broadcaster on the government that licenses it, a magazine on its largest advertiser. The reporting may be fine. Read it laterally anyway.
• When it is the only one carrying it. A genuine scoop and a fabrication look identical from outside on day one. The difference shows up in whether anyone matches it.
• When the claim is enormous and the sourcing is thin. The size of a claim sets the size of the evidence it needs. An accusation that would end a career, resting on one unnamed person, is not ready no matter who printed it.
• When you are about to act on it. Sharing, voting, giving money, going somewhere. The moment the claim changes what you do is the moment it is worth the twenty minutes.

Where That Leaves Us

This desk is not a newsroom of the kind described above and does not claim to be. We do not break investigations; we follow what happened after somebody else broke them. Trusting us therefore means trusting the outlets underneath us, which is why every claim on this site carries a link out to the reporting it came from and why our About page points at the organisations doing the original work rather than at ourselves.

Read the link. If the reporting under one of our sentences turns out to be thinner than the sentence, that is a finding about us, and we would like to be the ones who publish it.