WR 121 Ross: Evaluating Sources

First, research the author of the claim. Sometimes there will be no listed author or the author is an organization. If that's the case, skip down to Step 2.

Often you can click on the name of the author in the article and get a short biography and/or a list of articles they've authored on that website. That might be useful, but you'll also want to go beyond the site to see what people say about the author. You can Google their name to find out more about them. If their name is common, you might need to add terms like journalist, reporter, or writer to the search.

What you're looking for is evidence that they are a trustworthy expert. This may be because of their educational background, their life experience, or through the quality of the sources they use to support their claim. Journalists are not necessarily experts in everything they write about, but they are experts at pulling information together from other expert sources (like researchers, people working in that area, people affected by the thing being written about) to tell a story. 

As you learn about the author, think about what about their background makes you trust or not trust them? You might even find a mix of good and bad evidence about their trustworthiness. It's not always 100% obvious whether you should trust the authority of the author or not.

Next, you'll want to going to look at the publication to see what their reputation is. This might be a newspaper, magazine, or journal title, the name of an organization, or the name of a website. We could just look at their "About" page, but of course that is going to say positive things about them.

So instead, you'll want to Google the publication. Look for things that are not by the organization themselves, particularly a Wikipedia entry or an article that describes them. In the screenshot below, I searched for information about Children's Health Defense which shows that it is one of the main sources of misinformation about vaccines.

You can also use the Media Bias Fact Check website to see how biased the organization is and how fact-based their articles are. Generally, if you're looking for quality journalism or trustworthy information, you'll want to use articles from organizations that are politically fairly close to the center, aren't promoting pseudoscience, and have a factual reporting rating of High or Very High. As you can see, the Children's Health Defense is far from meeting those standards.

Look for clues in the article or on the website itself that give you a sense of whether the organization/publication has an overall bias or agenda that could impact the trustworthiness of the article you're evaluating. This could include:

• The language within the article
• Other information around the article (ads, navigation, etc.)
• The look and feel of the website
• The About page of the website
• Other things your class came up with at the start of class.

Even if the source you found is trustworthy or not trustworthy, it's possible that there is some truth or some inaccuracies in the claim. You should search for additional articles about your claim to see if you can find articles from reputable sources that support or dispute the claim. Below, you'll see I'm searching for information about the claim that victims of Hurricane Helene are only receiving $750 from the government and I found several reputable sources that provide additional context and fact-checking. 

You can also see if your claim has already been fact-checked by a fact-checking organization. Here are the largest ones:

• Snopes

• Politifact

• FactCheck.org

• Washington Post Fact Checker

• VerifyThis.com

The fact-checking websites will track a claim to its source, identifying potential biases and concerns about trustworthiness with the original source. You can search Google for your claim and include the term fact check.