News Evaluation

About News Evaluation

Most arguments about bias are really arguments about who was asked. Start with the source list instead of the headline and the whole dispute changes shape.

A story can quote widely and still rest on nobody with first-hand knowledge. We separate witnesses from commentators, named sources from attributed ones, and documents from people describing documents, then show how a piece reads once you mark each quote with what the speaker could personally know.

Framing rarely requires a false sentence. It requires a choice of baseline, a choice of timeframe and a choice of which comparison goes first. A walk through the standard moves, using an ordinary story with no villain in it, so the technique is visible without the politics.

Each retelling drops a qualifier. By the third version the sample size, the confidence interval and the word associated have all gone, and a tentative finding is reported as a cause. We follow one claim down the chain and mark exactly where each caveat fell off.

Look for whether corrections are attached to the original article or buried on a separate page, whether they say what changed, and whether the outlet ever corrects itself unprompted. A publication's error handling predicts its reliability better than its tone does.

Commissioned research is not automatically wrong, but who paid, what was asked and what went unreported all belong in the story. How to find the funder, how to spot the questions that were designed to produce a headline, and what a responsible disclosure line looks like.

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