Real news is written by real journalists who adhere to a code of ethics for reporting. One way to ensure that you get accurate news is to make sure your news is written by professional journalists rather than content creators from the general public. When in doubt about an author, Google them and find out more.
The Society for Professional Journalists Code of Ethics outlines that journalists should:
For a full description click here: SPJ Code of Ethics
Use the SIFT skills employed by many fact checkers to determine if a news source or claim is factual and trustworthy. Simply put the SIFT skills are:
| S | Stop! Do NOT read the source you just found, instead: |
| I | Investigate the source. Use Google, Fact Checking Websites and/or Wikipedia to find out more about the source of information. Good fact checking websites include, Snopes.com and AP Fact Checker. |
| F | Find the original source. If the source you found seems to be quoting from another article or other source, find the original source of information to confirm facts and investigate the original source. |
| T | Look for Trusted sources. Build a library in your mind of sources you have found to be trustworthy. When you see a claim online, you can Google the claim and add the name of one of your trusted sources to see if they have covered the same story. Fact checking websites like Snopes are great sources of trustworthy information because of the amount of research they do to verify a story. |
If you have questions about veracity of an image or video you can use Google Image Search (images.google.com).
1. Grab the URL for the photo that you are curious about, or download it to your computer. If using Google Chrome browser, you can right click and select "Search Google for Image"
2. Go to Google Images and click on the Camera Icon.
3. Paste the URL or upload your image.
4. See the results to find the original source, or what the web is saying about the images. This can also be done with screenshots from videos.
SIFT method was developed by Mike Caulfield based on the skills used by professionals used by fact-checkers
