MDIA5001 Chap.3 Sources, verification and fact checking
Sources, verification and fact checking
The organising maxim of this week is that a reporter is only as good as their sources, and the corollary the lecture draws is blunter: your credibility is your sources' credibility. The material splits into two halves that students often blur. The first half is a taxonomy.
Primary sources give direct, first hand evidence, are created during the period in question and reach you unfiltered by interpretation: eyewitnesses, direct interviews, original records, leaked material, raw footage, posts by participants.
Secondary sources analyse, interpret or summarise those primaries after the fact: later write ups by other outlets, issued statements, commentary from people who were not present, research institute background, and historical accounts. A press release is a secondary source, which is worth sitting with, because the first assignment is built on one.
The course gives six rules for using secondary material responsibly, and two of them are the ones markers notice: verify independently where you can, and add new reporting or an angle so that the work is not aggregation. The second half is process.
Verification is defined as an editorial technique applied before publication and judged on the process followed; fact checking is a specific application of it, aimed at claims, usually after publication, and it ends in a verdict of true, false or misleading. The lecture supplies the standard five checks that run under both: provenance, source, date, location and motivation.
Around that sits the wider landscape of information disorder, split by falseness and by intent to harm into misinformation, disinformation and malinformation, and broken down further into seven types from satire through false context to fabricated content, with a layered defence model that treats no single intervention as sufficient.
The practical skill underneath all of it is narrower than it sounds: deciding which sentences in front of you contain a claim that can be checked at all.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Why source quality sets the ceiling on reporting quality
- 02
Primary sources: first hand, contemporaneous and unfiltered, with the six examples the course gives
- 03
Secondary sources: analysis, interpretation and summary written after the fact, including press releases
- 04
Six rules for using secondary sources responsibly, and the two markers notice
- 05
On the record, off the record, and the four guidelines for anonymity
- 06
Facts against opinions, and the three successive definitions the lecture offers
- 07
Sorting checkable from non checkable statements, which is the first move in any check
- 08
Verification as a pre publication process against fact checking as a post publication verdict
- 09
The five verification questions: provenance, source, date, location, motivation
- 10
Cross referencing across independent sources, databases and official records
- 11
Information disorder: misinformation, disinformation, malinformation, and the seven content types
Sorting a statement block into checkable and non checkable claims
- +1Sentence one is not checkable. Calling the network the backbone of the city is a metaphor expressing a value, and there is no record anywhere that could return true or false on it. Reporters routinely quote sentences like this and then treat the quote as though it established something. It establishes only that the minister said it.
- +1Sentence two is not checkable either, and for a different reason worth naming: it is normative. It says what ought to be the case. You could check whether anyone does wait twenty minutes, but that is a different sentence from the one that was uttered. Confusing the two is how a reporter ends up fact checking a claim nobody made.
- +1Sentence three is checkable and is the most important sentence in the block. Punctuality over four quarters is a measured series held by the operator and usually published by the regulator or the transport department. Consult the published performance reports, and note the definition of on time being used, because a change in the threshold can produce an improvement without any train moving faster.
- +1Sentence four is a prediction and therefore not checkable now. What is checkable is the basis for it: any asset condition report, maintenance backlog figure or agency modelling the department holds. Report the prediction as a claim, and report the evidence for it separately. A forecast is never made true by being confidently stated.
- +1Sentence five is checkable and is where a story usually is. A stated number of added services from a stated month can be tested against the published timetable and against the current one. If the timetable shows a smaller increase, or shows services moved rather than added, you have moved from reporting the announcement to reporting the announcement's accuracy, which is the difference the top rubric band describes.
Key terms
- Primary source
- Material giving direct, first hand evidence of an event, created at the time and reaching the reporter without an interpretive layer, such as an eyewitness, an original record or raw footage.
- Secondary source
- Material that analyses, interprets or summarises primary sources after the event, including other news reports, press releases, uninvolved expert commentary and think tank background.
- Verification
- The editorial technique of establishing that collected information is accurate, applied before publication and judged on the rigour of the process rather than on the verdict reached.
- Fact checking
- Verification applied to a specific claim, statement or narrative, usually after publication, and concluding with a judgement that the claim is true, false or misleading.
- Checkable statement
- A sentence containing a claim that some record could confirm or refute, as distinct from a value judgement, a normative claim or a prediction.
- Cross referencing
- Comparing information across multiple independent sources, official records and specialist databases in order to expose discrepancies and confirm what several of them agree on.
- Information disorder
- The umbrella framework for false and misleading information in circulation, distinguished along the axes of falseness and intent to harm.
- Malinformation
- Genuine information released or reframed in order to cause harm, which is why truth alone is not a sufficient ethical test for publication.
Sources, verification and fact checking FAQ
Is a press release a primary or a secondary source?
Secondary, and treating it as primary is the most common conceptual error in the first assignment. A release is written after the events it describes, by an organisation with an interest in how they are understood, and it summarises and frames material that exists elsewhere. That does not make it useless. It is a legitimate secondary source and the assignment is built on one.
It does mean the six rules for handling secondary material apply in full: attribute it properly, verify what you can independently, weigh the credibility and interests of whoever wrote it, be transparent about where your information came from, and add reporting or an angle so that what you produce is not aggregation.
The one primary element inside most releases is the direct quotation, which is a first hand statement by a named person and can be used verbatim provided you attribute it by person, title and organisation.
What is the difference between verification and fact checking in practice?
Timing and object. Verification runs before you publish and its object is your own material: is this document what it claims to be, was this photograph taken where and when it says, is this person who they say they are. It is judged on process, which is why editors ask what you did rather than what you concluded. Fact checking runs against a claim, usually one already in public circulation, and produces a public verdict on it.
The five questions underneath both are the same: where did this come from, who is behind it, when was it made, where was it made, and why does this person want me to have it. In the assignments the verification half is the one that is silently assessed, because the accuracy and sourcing rubric row asks whether you demonstrated verification and context, not whether you issued a ruling.
How careful do I need to be with an anonymous source in a student assignment?
For the news article the question is settled: the assignment states that interviewees must be formally attributed and that no anonymisation is allowed for that piece, so an anonymous source cannot carry it. The concepts still matter, because the course teaches them and because they apply beyond this unit.
The four guidelines it gives are worth internalising: verify the information through multiple channels rather than trusting it because it was whispered, understand why the source wants it out, explain to readers why the person is unnamed, and give as much context about them as anonymity allows.
Off the record is a third category again, meaning the information cannot be published at all but can be used to orient your reporting, and the failure mode is agreeing to it after the fact rather than before.
Assessment move
Drill the sorting move rather than the taxonomy, because the taxonomy is easy and the sorting is where marks are lost. Take any political speech, an interview transcript or a media conference, and go through it sentence by sentence marking each one checkable or not.
Do it three times and you will start noticing that the checkable sentences cluster, usually around numbers, dates and commitments, and that the persuasive weight of a speech usually sits in the sentences you cannot check. Second, learn one verification tool properly rather than five superficially.
Reverse image search is the highest return, because a recycled photograph is the most common failure a student story can make and it takes thirty seconds to catch. Third, build the habit of asking for the definition. Before you report a rate, a percentage or a coverage figure, find out what it is measuring and over what population; most public disputes about numbers turn out to be disputes about denominators.
Fourth, keep a two line note of every secondary source you use, with who published it and what interest they have. That note becomes your transparency clause when you write, and the transparency clause is what the ethics rubric row is looking for.
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