Should you trust that news story you're reading? Here's how to check.

Should you trust that news story you're reading? Here's how to check.

One of the hottest questions in the aftermath of the 2016 election has been how to fight the plague of fake news. Facebook has alternately evaded and grappled with its role in the crisis. Fake-news writers have explained their motivations. And my colleague David Ignatius has looked at the international implications of a wave of falsehoods.

washingtonpost.com

Nick Baumann, senior enterprise editor at the Huffington Post, wrote back with a lengthy list of basic tests for readers, among them checking how long the outlet has been around and what its leanings are, trying to figure out what else the author has written and seeing whether any other outlet has confirmed the story’s findings.

“Does the writer show her work by saying how and where she got her information? Or does she simply assert things?” he wrote. “Do the names in this story sound made up? Are experts cited? If you Google their names, are they real? … Does this story being true require there having been a secret conspiracy to hide it? How many people would have to be involved in that conspiracy? The more people who would have had to be involved, the less likely the story is to be true. The main question is the classic one: Is this too good to be true?”

To Baumann’s suggestions, I’d add a few more quick checks. If there are numbers in the story, where do they come from? A recognized think tank or data-gathering government agency? If the writer quotes people, do they provide some indication of whether their sources’ statements are true? To Lewis’s point, does the publication employ editors, fact-checkers and copy editors, and do all of them look at every piece that’s published?

These ideas are only helpful, of course, if people want to verify that what they’re reading is real. For the rest of us, the fake-news epidemic demands of us that we do more than share good stories. We have to explain why we’re passing along the news, what we trust about it and why.