Get your facts straight! Or don’t….

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The internet has brought us closer together. Stories can now reach much more people than let’s say 30 years ago and that’s a good thing. Much more people can have access to the stories you wrote and you can get in direct contact with your readers. But there is also a downside to this closing gap. Not only true stories are spread but also fake ones or at least not completely true ones. That is why fact-checking has become a bigger responsibility and a greater challenge. Still the amount of fact-checkers that are employed in a news organization is decreasing. It seem that the old saying ‘Get your facts straight’ isn’t as important anymore. But can you really make a good, trustworthy story without getting all the right facts?

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According to this famous quote by Bernard Baruch, every man has a right to be wrong in his opinions, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts. So it is your duty to get all the right facts. Still as journalist Federico Guerrini mentioned in his article for the Oxford magazine a more popular belief among politicians, and some journalists, is why should you spoil a good story with the truth.

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So which one is it? Who has the right idea about facts? Well, it isn’t that black and white. The right direction, in my opinion, lies in the middle. It is important to check your facts since it is your duty as a journalist to write accurate stories, but in some cases you can bend the truth a little to create a more attractive or interesting story. Besides, as I will explain later, it is impossible to check every single fact.

Why should you check your facts?

Fact-checking is, as I mentioned earlier, still important since it is your job as a journalist to write accurate stories. One of the newspapers that still have a separate fact-checking department is the German newspaper Der Spiegel. Their motto is “to say what is”. It is important tothem “[…] to write and produce what is; to report, analyse and critique the world as it is, factually and faithfully, without fear, bias or influence”. According to the head of the fact-checking department, Dr. Eckart Teichert, Der Spiegel prints facts regardless of whether a friend or an enemy will be pleased and as a fact checker he also corrects the facts.  And not only will fact-checking make your article more accurate, it will also make it more credible. Klaus Brinkbäumer, one of the three editors for Der Spiegel, calls fact-checking their selling point. He sees it as part of what makes the newspaper trusted.

Why is it important for journalists to check their facts?

Being a good fact checker basically means being a good reporter according to the former head of research Vanity Fair, as quoted in the book ‘The Fact Checker’s Bible: A Guide to Getting It Right’ by Sarah Harrison Smith in 2004. But why is that so? Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel write in their book ‘The Elements of Journalism‘ that it is important for journalist to fact-check, because of the following five rules:

1. Journalists first obligation is to the truth
2. Journalists first loyalty is to the citizens
3. The essence of journalism is a discipline of verification
4. Journalists must maintain an independence from those they cover
5. Journalists must keep the news comprehensive and proportional

Why is fact-checking important for the public?

You have read now why fact-checking is important for journalists, but why is it important for the public? According to the international principles of professional ethics in journalism, as issued by the Fourth Consultative Meeting of International and Regional Organizations of Journalists in Paris on 20 November 1983, people have the right to true information and it is the journalist’s task to serve that right. The public have a right to get the objective picture of the reality. The people have a right, according to these principles, to have access to accurate and comprehensive information. They also have the right to express themselves freely through various media platforms. Furthermore, it is the journalist’s task to serve those rights to true and authentic information. Facts need to be reported in their proper context and the journalist should provide information so that the public can form a clear, honest and object picture of the world.

Why you should not and cannot get every fact right

As I said earlier, it is important to check your facts and to get the right facts, but in some cases you can bend the truth a little to create a more attractive or interesting story. Let’s say, for example, you are writing an article about how the amount of people who commit suicide increases during the holidays in December. You talk about the numbers and how they relate to other months. To describe the situation you might also say something about that many people don’t have family members to visit anymore or the days that are darker and colder during that time. Now does everything you see need to be right? Does it matter that the numbers might be incorrect? Yes, that matters since an incorrect number could change the whole story. But does it matter that December is indeed the coldest month? No, it is not important for your story that November, for example, was colder that year of the past few years than December. So it is important to get your facts right when it could change your whole point of view. But it isn’t as important to get all the right facts if it wouldn’t change much about your main point.

Furthermore, it is also impossible to get every fact right. Facts aren’t always objective. They can be open to interpretation. Facts can also change over time. Something that was a true fact years ago, might not still be a true fact.

Conclusion

To summarize, getting your facts straight seems less important to some nowadays, but in my opinion it still is. It is important to make sure you have the right facts and that your facts are true. It creates a trustworthy article and also increases your credibility. However, you don’t have to get, and you cannot get, ALL the facts right. In some cases you can still have a good story without having all the facts. Besides, it is also impossible to get all the facts right.

You cannot trust the internet, but you can trust news websites. Can you not?

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In this day and age the internet plays a very large role in our lives. Vacation pictures are going on Facebook and Instagram, our funny conversations with friends are Tweeted and Retweeted and songs we or our children sing are recorded and uploaded to YouTube. Most of us are glued to our phone and computer and rely on the internet for all sorts of things. Not just recreational and fun things, but we rely on the internet as a source of news and information as well. And that is exactly where it gets problematic.

Imagine that you are scrolling through your favourite news website to see if there is anything new happening in the world. You see a catchy headline, click on the story and start to read. The story sounds plausible and has a picture with proof that the described situation happened. So the story must be true, right? Why else would a news website give this story any attention? Well, think again. Of course a news website is dedicated to real news and real events and not fake stories, but even people who write for news website might get caught in this web of internet lies. Take for example, the story that has been circulating about a tourist who came back from a vacation in Bali and found out that there was a spider living in his body. This story has circulated on social media, but has also been posted on various news website all around the world. Websites like the Australian NT News, the Dutch Algemeen Dagblad, and the Irish Daily Mirror to name a few have published this story. It was later stated by various experts that spiders are not naturally inclined to show this kind of behavior and that, therefore, the story was fake.

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Verification steps

Even journalists might find it difficult to verify certain stories. Unless you witnessed something in person, it is not easy to determine whether or not a certain situation has actually happened. So how do you know what event is real and what event is not? A sufficient, concrete answer to this question is not easily found. According to Claire Wardle there is not any technology that can verify a specific user-generated content (such as the Twitter picture of the man with the spider in his body) with a 100 percent certainty. However, there are a few guidelines that can help you predict whether a story might be true or not. Wardle describes the following steps that can help you determine how plausible a story is and that can help you as a journalist decide whether or not to publish a certain story. There are more verification methods that you can use, but this blog post will focus on the four main factors. If you are interested in other verification methods or more detailed descriptions, you can look at the Verification handbook.

Step 1 & 2: Look at the provenance and the source
When a certain story has been shared on social media and other websites multiple times, it becomes difficult to determine who the original source is. The first thing to do is to browse though all the links and go back to the first time the story has been published. When you find the website or the profile of the person who has brought the story into the world, there are a few things you need to pay attention to. Look at previous articles or status updates, the people in the friend list or the followers and the pictures and videos that have been shared. Do you notice anything striking about these things? Have they been talking about serious matters or more about fun and playful matters? Use your common sense here. If something already seems a bit off at this point, it probably is. However, if you want to be sure, there are a few tools you can use to verify the information you have gathered during your search. Reverse image search tools such as Google Images or TinEye can, for example, help you check whether a picture has been published online before. Another way to check a story is to simple get in touch with the original publisher and ask him or her questions about the content.

Step 3: Look at the dateWhen looking at pictures or videos it is not only important to see if the picture or video has been posted online before, but also if what date it is taken. The date can reveal if it could be taken during the event that is shown. You can also verify the date by checking the weather of that specific date. Let’s for example say that the picture you have found was taken on the 1th of November 2014 in the Netherlands. In the picture you found you can see that it was a very dark, rainy day, which sounds plausible if you think that November is indeed an autumn month. However, if you go to Google and you look at the weather that day, you can see that it was actually a pretty hot and sunny day. Thus, the picture you have found probably is not taken on that exact date.

Step 4: Look at the location
Besides the date, the location is also an important factor. You can verify the location by searching it on Google Street View. If there are key elements missing from the Google Street View picture that are shown in the picture itself, it probably is not a real, untouched picture.

Conclusion

To answer the question proposed in the title of this blog post, you probably  can trust news websites most of the time since their main goal is indeed to provide you information about real events and not to share fake stories. However, the same lesson, namely ‘do not trust everything you see on the internet’, that applies to the internet in general also applies to news websites. You cannot trust everything that is reported on news websites either. Use your common sense when you look at news websites as a source of information. And when you are still in doubt, make use of the tools that are available to you to verify the information. The most important thing to remember is that when something sounds off, it probably is even when it is published on a website with the intention of sharing only real news.