By Vanessa Otero

At my company, Ad Fontes Media, we rate news (and “news-like”) sources for reliability and bias. Our politically-balanced teams of analysts evaluate content—articles, podcasts, and TV news shows— from hundreds of sources, day-in and day-out. This work gives us a good sense of which ones are reliable and equips us with tools to find out what is reliable when we don’t know.

            However, most people simply do not the have time (let alone the desire or inclination) to become familiar with such a large number of news sources themselves. Yet the challenge of the modern media landscape is that there are literally thousands of news sources, and each of us comes across unfamiliar ones in our social media feeds all the time.

Beyond that, we each encounter pieces of “news-like” information in other formats every day, such as memes, tweets, posts, and video links. As we have become well aware, quite a lot of that information is unreliable, ranging from the merely selective or misleading to the outright false.

            Because so many people feel inundated and overwhelmed by the sheer volume of news information out there, the most common question I get from individual news consumers is “how can I know what news to trust?” Many express frustration that it is not always easy to figure out.  

However, none of us have the luxury of simply giving up on the inquiry. Not only do we need to know what to trust to be good citizens; often, our professional roles require us to figure it out as well. We have the responsibility to learn what to trust, as challenging as that may be.

The first step to knowing what to trust is to get your head around what the actual challenge is: to be able to quickly come to a reasonable conclusion about whether something is more likely to be true or false—and to do that no matter what source the information comes from. This is what you need to be able to do to make good decisions about things that affect your life, health, job, community, and country. Consider, for example, how important it is to be able to quickly tell what is true or not when it comes to COVID-19 information or the election.

Note that the challenge is not to take a long time and reach 100% certainty about the absolute truth of each piece of information you consume. The reason? It is pretty much impossible to do that.

            Once you get comfortable with the fact that it is impossible for any one person to fact check and verify every statement in every article, you can focus on getting proficient the task at hand.

What it takes to tell what is true in the news boils down to a specific skill: being a good “looker-upper.” A Stanford study from 2017 showed that this practice, referred to in the study as “lateral reading” was a key factor in the study in helping people quickly figure out what was true.

Here are steps to becoming a good “looker-upper.”

1)    When reading a piece of content, if any statements sound surprising, fishy, or shocking to you, and sound like they would be “big, if true,” it is time to start digging.

2)    Rely on our media ecosystem to triangulate.

In the United States, we are fortunate to have a robust media ecosystem full of professional fact-checkers and journalists at thousands of news organizations across the country whose jobs are to investigate questionable claims as quickly as possible.

If you come across a “fact” that you have reason to doubt, verifying it is as easy as entering the questionable fact in a search engine and scanning the results that come up. Really, just pop open a new tab and search for the exact facts you are looking to verify. This is a simple step, but one so many people skip. 

3)    Consider both what you do and do not find.

In some cases, your search results may reveal a “fact check” or a “debunking” article that can conclusively tell you is something is true or false.

However, but many stories do not warrant a full investigative fact-check from a fact-checking organization. More often what you find is one of two options: 1) another reputable organization has corroborated the fact or 2) no other reputable organization has corroborated the fact.

The key here is that you only accept corroboration from reputable organizations. If you can only find the fact you are looking for in other obscure places, such as social media posts, small blogs, unfamiliar news sites, or YouTube videos, be skeptical.

If the claim is consequential and you cannot find it corroborated in a reputable source, assume it is false until you find it confirmed later.

Though these steps seem simple, misinformation often spreads because so many people do not take these steps. Worse, many people share questionable information that they do not bother to look up in this manner.

If you do not have time to at least look up the truth behind a shocking or important-sounding story on social media, an important step you can take is to wait before sharing the story further. There usually is not a compelling reason for you personally to instantly share it, and often, the simple of act of waiting can save you occasional embarrassment.

We are in an unprecedented age of communication, which brings so many possibilities for our societal benefit. However, we are experiencing the growing pains of this new communication age because our collective ability to distribute information has temporarily outpaced our individual capacities to process it all. I am optimistic that we can rise to the occasion, and we must. What it will take is everyone’s effort to learn how to tell what is true in the news.

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