# Evaluating the Trustworthiness of a News Article

By Drew Breunig

Assess the claims made in a news article, essay, or other piece for their trustworthiness and intent.

- [ ] <strong>Verify expertise.</strong> Assess the author’s qualifications and track record. Review their past work to determine what subjects they usually cover or if there’s a history of specific point-of-view.
- [ ] <strong>Check for conflicts of interest.</strong> Look to see if the publisher or author has potential conflicts of interest related to their business, funding, political interests, or associations. Consider how these might skew the article.
- [ ] <strong>Look for consensus.</strong> If the article or document is making claims, are these claims shared by other experts in the field? It’s okay for someone to take a unique position, but additional rigor should be applied to understand how the justify their position when it diverges from expert consensus.
- [ ] <strong>Evaluate the evidence.</strong> Carefully read the piece and highlight or note the evidence that is cited. Is the evidence selective and not representative of a given domain? Is the evidence spurious or well documented by additional sources? Are multiple, relevant pieces of evidence provided or do they run out of material quickly?
- [ ] <strong>Make sure the headline and lede agree with the rest of the article. </strong>It’s all too common for a headline to be written in a way that doesn’t represent the <em>whole </em>of the article. Reevaluate the headline and first paragraph after reading the entire article. Do they disagree with caveats or context presented towards the end of the piece?
- [ ] <strong>Check the date of the article and the evidence cited.</strong> The article may be irrelevant given the date it was published. Same goes for the evidence being cited: if the evidence is thin and spread over a long timeline, be cautious.
- [ ] <strong>Check the photos.</strong> Photos often will be file photos not specific to the event or subject of the article. Photos may be dated and detail something wholly unrelated. If the photo’s byline and citation aren’t provided, conduct a reverse image search with Google or another search engine to identify the source.
- [ ] <strong>Contextualize the quotes.</strong> If the article is quoting a document or statement that is easily referenced, find the original source and find the quote and its full context. Often quotes are cherry picked or removed from context to support a spurious position.
- [ ] <strong>Compare to known, trusted outlets.</strong> If the story is only being covered by a subset of outlets and authors, treat with caution.
- [ ] <strong>Inspect the research.</strong> If a scientific paper or study is cited as evidence, find the original publication and (at the very least) read the abstract. Check to ensure the main thrust of the paper agrees with how it is being presented in the article. Check the statistical significance and sample sizes used to support their claims. Check that their subject sample is <em>representative</em>, not an odd subset unrelated to the article. Finally, check that the paper has been published and reviewed by a trusted publisher.