How to Find News You Can Trust
An Article of the Modern Survival Guide
The last few years have been a real education about how people consume news, and it’s raised a few problems that need addressing. Let’s start with a core statement: we need the news! This is how the vast majority of people get the vast majority of what they consider valid information. Yeah, social media accounts for a lot of news distribution, but the news media is what still creates most of it. We need the news, because most of us don’t have the time or resources to do research, and that’s all there is to it.
The catch is, it’s becoming increasingly hard to find news that’s actually, well, news in the United States. It’s out there, but an awful lot of people don’t use it, and those people tend to believe that whatever it is they are watching is of equivalent value. This is a very serious, very present survival issue at all times, but especially at this moment in US history, which is why it gets its very own article in a series titled “The Modern Survival Guide.” Fake news is out there, and it is… really bad. Just really, really bad, folks.
The consequences of believing fake news should be pretty readily apparent at this point, but I’ll summarize: fake news gets you broke, sick, deluded, and/or killed. It is a tool used by people who have no interest in your life or quality thereof to get you to do things that are contrary to your interests as a citizen, or at the very least do things that are exclusively to their interests. We should all be very wary of it, avoid it at all costs, and punish it when we find it.
That’s a separate article. We’re here to talk about real news, and how to identify it. Real news has the following seven qualities:
- It is attributable to an author
- It cites reputable sources
- It minimizes bias
- It is accurate to the real world
- It is repeated by other reputable sources
- It is logically consistent
- It is not subject to repeated retractions
What this means in a nutshell is that you are responsible for curating your news sources. There are tools out there to help you, Google search being right at the top of the list, but you should be evaluating the news that you consume. If you don’t you will inevitably wind up consuming fake news, and your worldview will suffer as a result.¹
With that in mind, let’s talk about these points in a little more depth.
Attribution
Real news welcomes accountability, and in fact encourages it by identifying the people and organizations who create content. If you cannot find the author of an article or story, be suspicious. Attribution allows you to do a quick search to get the background on the author, which you should do for any important news story — which is to say checking on an author isn’t as necessary when reading a story about rescued puppies vs. a story about the Capitol Riot, for example. If the author has a documented history of working for biased organizations or creating biased content, they may not be a trustworthy news source.²
Citation
A key factor of real news is that news does not create facts — it just reports them. Consequently, any real news article will tell you where it got its facts by citing sources. These sources should be identifiable, reputable individuals or institutions, which is to say they should have an established track record or verifiable background as experts in the topic they’re talking about.
It’s important to remember two things when looking at citations. First, expertise usually implies a very narrow focus. If you’re reading an article on relationships, and the author cites a physicist’s opinions, those opinions are not likely the most relevant (not because they’re necessarily wrong, but because they’re coming from a physicist, not a relationship counselor). If the author cites a doctor, make sure they’re a doctor in the field under discussion. If the author cites a businessman, make sure they’ve had experience in the type of business under discussion. That kind of thing is important, because sometimes even good reporters cut corners and ask the wrong expert about the wrong topic.
The second thing to remember about citations is that it’s very easy to mix up expert commentary with opinion statements. Expert commentary deals in facts as the expert understands them. Opinion statements deal with thoughts that someone is expressing, which may or may not have basis in fact. For example, literally anything that any politician says that gets quoted in the news should be treated as an opinion, not a piece of expert commentary. Politicians are only experts in the political process, and anything they say while in office is inherently biased.
In contrast, a virologist talking about the mechanisms by which a virus infects a host in response to, say, an international pandemic, is someone you should listen to. Verify them, yes. But once they’re verified as belonging to a reputable organization and having a solid track record, listen to them.
Bottom line, if you take nothing else away from this article, remember to pay attention to citations and verify them if at all possible. After a while, you’ll start to get a good picture of who is reliable and who isn’t.
Bias
Reputable news sources do what they can to minimize bias in reporting. There are three big parts to this process: identifying sponsors, contexualizing sources, and fact-based reporting.
A reputable news source minimizes bias by clearly identifying their sponsors, especially when those sponsors might be relevant to a news story. This allows the reader or viewing an opportunity to realize that the story might be biased, and they should take it with a grain of salt.
A reputable news source gives the reader or viewer context about their sources. If they’re identifying an expert, they don’t just say “This is Dan, he’s an expert in tax accounting,” they say “This is Dan, he’s a tax accountant working for Intuit. Intuit, as you know, has a major lobbying presence around tax law.” This gives the audience the chance to realize that Dan might just be shilling a particular corporate viewpoint.
A reputable news source sticks to fact-based reporting as much as possible. This means that during news programs, they do not mix facts with opinions and strive to use neutral language. For example, “200 Killed in Plane Crash” is a fact-based reporting headline. It tells you what happened. “200 Killed — Massive Plane Crash Would’ve Never Happened Under Obama,” on the other hand, is an inherently biased reporting piece. It’s pushing an opinion thinly disguised as reporting the news.
Here’s a pretty good chart that shows the known biases of major news organizations: https://guides.lib.umich.edu/c.php?g=637508&p=4462444
Accuracy
Reputable news sources are accurate — they reflect what’s actually happening in the real world, and can be verified as doing so. When verifying accuracy, start small. Look to the things you personally can see to be true or not as your initial judgement. For example, if a news story reports that there’s a hurricane in your area, and you look outside to clear skies, it may not be an accurate story.
Next, repeat this step several times with different subjects. To err is human, and news organizations are run by humans, so they will occasionally make mistakes, and it’s not wise to judge an entire organization on one story. However, a reputable news source gets the overwhelmingly vast majority of their stories right. Start small and work your way up, beginning with things you can see and moving on to using other reputable sources to verify the accuracy of news articles.
When verifying accuracy, it’s important to be very careful to avoid bias in your own sources. If you’re trying to figure out if an article about global warming is accurate, for example, you’re going to run across a huge volume of differing opinions and a swarm of misinformation. I’ve found Wikipedia to be an invaluable resource in these cases, if only because it’s a great way to get a snapshot picture of most organizations and find quick summaries of their goals. To continue the example, if you’re reading a source about global warming and Wikipedia says that source is a fossil fuel industry think tank, they are probably biased and therefore should not be used to determine accuracy.
Repetition
Reputable journalism gets repeated, as a general rule. If you see a headline that says “200 Killed in Plane Crash” on one site, and all the other mainstream news sites have no coverage, well… that plane crash might not have happened quite the way it was described.
There are some pretty serious caveats to this statement.
The first is that fake news sites work the same way. If you’re in a fake news bubble, you will see sites repeating the same lies over and over. That’s the reason this point is lower down on the list: you have to have some general knowledge of which sources are valid and which are not before you start making this judgement, and if you don’t you’ll just crawl deeper into a fake news echo chamber.
Another major issue is that there are news companies that control such huge segments of the news market that they can (either knowingly or unknowingly) repeat falsehoods over vast swathes of the country simply by distributing the same script. Sinclair Broadcast Group, for example, owns the majority of local news TV stations in the US. They can easily repeat false statements, and have been criticized many times for doing so.
A third major issue is that there are times when a news organization gets a genuine scoop and reports a major issue first. In these cases other news networks often won’t immediately report the story while they perform their own validations.
A fourth major issue is that, from time to time, the news media does not verify stories before re-publishing them, especially if they are juicy. This doesn’t happen often, but when it does you should watch to see who is the fastest to publish retractions. Those are, counter-intuitively, probably your most reputable news outlets.
However, in general, this is a good rule of thumb. If you see a sensational headline, it’s worth your while to see if other reputable networks are repeating it. If they aren’t, it’s worthy of skepticism.
Logical Consistency
It’s a good idea to pay attention to a news organization to make sure they are logically consistent in their reporting. This is not only a good check on their validity, it’s a good check on their editorial process.
Logical consistency in this sense simply means that the organization reports events in such a way that different stories do not contradict one another. For example, if you were viewing a network that showed an article one day with the title “COVID Deaths Increase in All States” and the following day the network showed an article with the title “COVID Severity Overblown,” that’s probably a red flag. It seems as though the network isn’t maintaining a logically consistent story, since those two headlines probably cannot coexist with the same available facts.³
This isn’t to say that networks have to tell the same story forever, and they shouldn’t; life is messy, and sometimes the narrative has to change with available facts. But the news should make every effort to inform you why the story is changing.
Retractions
Retractions occur when networks tell a false story and want to make sure the public is aware that they have done so. This is usually a good thing. Again, life is complicated, news stories often operate on unclear information, and people make mistakes. A network telling you they made a mistake is infinitely preferable to a network refusing to admit error. It’s a mark of trust, usually.
What you want to watch out for are repeated retractions regarding the same type of story over a short timeframe (weeks or a month or two). This likely indicates that an organization is getting called out on a patently false narrative, and moreover is not correcting the problem internally.
For example, returning to recent events for context, if you notice that a news group is publishing and then retracting COVID-related stories over and over again, that’s a bad sign. It means they either aren’t quality checking their stories, or they’re deliberately publishing falsehoods and getting called to account. Neither situation is indicative of a quality news source.
We All Need News, But Let’s Be Smart About It
At the end of the day, most of us are going to turn on the TV, or listen to the radio, or read an article online to find out what’s going on in the world around us. We need the news, and we need to make sure the news we view is news we can trust.
With that in mind, the next time you find yourself wondering “Is this for real?” I would strongly advise a run through this checklist. Is the story attributed to a reliable author? Are the sources listed and reputable? How biased is the author or news service? Are they usually accurate? Are other organizations telling the same story? Is your news source consistent with their logic and regular in their quality?
If the answers come out the right way, you’ve found yourself a usually reliable news source. If not, drop that group like third period French and move one; we live in the information age, the least we can do is take advantage of it.
But always, always check your news. Not just once or twice. Constantly. It is critical to your survival in the modern world to get the right information, from reliable sources, on a timely basis. The risks of not doing so include financial ruin, personal loss, disgrace, and death. None of these are happy things, so do your best to make sure they don’t happen to you, and get your news from people who call a spade a spade.
¹It is important to remember that fake news organizations specialize in gaslighting you. They can, will, and do claim that reputable news sources are, in fact, the fake news. The most recent example is probably OAN, a far-right “news” network that gained prominence during the Trump years and shamelessly lied about or deliberately misrepresented nearly every major topic of the day.
²Normally it’s a logical fallacy to assume that someone is wrong just because of who they are. This does not apply to journalism. Once an author has demonstrated that they aren’t reliable, they shouldn’t be treated as reliable.
³This is, incidentally, why I dislike FOX News. There, you’ve seen some personal bias from me. They are shamelessly bad at logical consistency, to the point that they should be embarrassed, but they aren’t and they keep doing it. My favorite recent example is Tucker Carlson spouting off against vaccines after he had been vaccinated.
