LibGuides: SIFT Instruction: (I)nvestigate the source

(I)nvestigate the source

Read what other people say about the source (publication, author, etc.). The truth is in the network. The technique you are about to learn utilizes 'lateral reading', by leaving the article and seeing what other digital sources are saying about the content producer or author. Don't invest any time reading the webpage/article or going to the site's 'About' page, as you may have previously been taught.

Watch the following video to learn more:

Online Verification Skills — Video 2: Investigate the Source by CTRL-F. Video is closed captioned and transcripts are available on YouTube. (2 minutes, 45 seconds)

Have you been told not to trust Wikipedia? Watch this video, How to Use Wikipedia Wisely, to find out why Wikipedia can be a great tool on the web.

Understand the bias and the credibility of news/content providers by using Media Bias Fact Check. Other useful sites are SourceWatch, FactCheck.org, Politifact, and Snopes.

Practice example

Now, let's practice with our example.

Open a new tab in your browser and search for the name of the article source. In this case, it is HuffPost. I'm searching with Google, so my images will reflect that, but you can try this with the web search engine of your choice.

My first result is HuffPost.com, but I'm not going to spend any time looking at their website at this point. You may have been told in the past to go to the About page to find out more about a source, but the truth is, anyone can say anything about themselves on the web, whether it is true or not. Most companies, news producers, and content providers try to paint themselves in a positive light. We want to find what others are saying about them, not what they are saying about themselves.

In Google, sometimes an informational box (see image below) will appear on the right showing details about the news or content provider you are searching. Take a look at that and see if there is anything of interest to note there.

I do see that Wikipedia provided some of the content for the sidebar, so I can either click the Wikipedia link there, or I can do the trick Mike shows in the video and change my search to huffpost wikipedia to get the Wikipedia result to 'float' to the top of the results.

Wikipedia has received a bad rap over the years, and you have probably been told at some point that it can't be trusted. The content on Wikipedia must be sourced (see the references at the end of the article) and much of the content has been added by experts in the field, scholars, and librarians, and content is continuously being updated and evaluated. Questionable articles often have banners at the top of the article documenting the problems. While you may not be able to use Wikipedia directly as a source, feel free to use it to supplement your own background research, get ideas for keywords for your search, and mine sources from the references.

At the top of the Wikipedia article for HuffPost, there are a few items that make me wary. It says that the site offers news, but also satire (a form of comedy that often looks like factual content, but is poking fun at something else), and blogs (which can be very opinionated and unsubstantiated.) It says it contains user generated content, which tells me that not everything is written by a professional journalist with their code of ethics. On the right, in the box, it says that they are a "News Aggregator" which means they post content that other news outlets create, but they aren't responsible for that content.

Further down the page in the Wikipedia article, there is also information about HuffPost publishing medical pseudoscience and a column that was later declared as hate speech.

In this example, I would probably stop after finding all of this credibility busting information on Wikipedia, but not all sources are as cut and dried as the HuffPost one is. Sometimes visiting couple different sites to evaluate the credibility of a source is the best course of action.

A good technique is to scroll down the page of the initial results on Google and see if another outlet is commenting on the credibility of the source. I found one from a source, AllSides, which evaluates bias of content creators, mostly news outlets.

Screenshot from Google showing AllSides result When I look at the article for HuffPost on AllSides I see that HuffPost is evaluated as being "Left" by an independent reviewer in 2023. HuffPost uses loaded language, exhibits extreme bias in reporting and omits viewpoints.

A note about bias: Bias, or, a preference for or prejudice against something, is common in many sources. It can be difficult to find sources without bias, most everything contains some. It is important for researchers to understand the bias of the source, and use that understanding to inform whether you find additional sources that can counter that slant, or look for another more moderate source. Bias can be one of several factors you use to evaluate the a source. General rule of thumb is to avoid sources that exhibit extremes, and find something that may be closer to unbiased. For more information about media bias, visit the AllSides How to Spot 16 Types of Media Bias article.

Another tool to evaluate a sources credibility and bias is Media Bias Fact Check. This site is run by professional fact checkers and I frequently use this site to get a quick overview of a content or news provider. While this site has a lot of ads (annoyingly so,) I like the concise way it conveys it's information, then explains why they have come to these conclusions. At the top of the article, there is a bias scale and below that is a Factual Reporting chart. For HuffPost, they were rated 'Left' for bias and 'Mixed' for Factual Reporting.

Further down the article I take a look at the Analysis/Bias section for a more detailed assessment. In this section, the factchecker's assessment is itemized and they recount some of the same observations we have run across elsewhere: Emotionally loaded headlines, questionable sourcing, failed fact checks, and promotion of pseudoscience.

At this point, we have a really good idea that HuffPost isn't a credible source.

Side note: Sometimes you will look in all of these places and you will find nothing, I mean NOTHING, about your source. If that is the case and you can neither establish credibility nor show untrustworthiness, it could be a good course of action to look for another source altogether in which you can establish credibility. Credible sources are trusted by many, and when you find a winner, you generally know it from their reputation across the web as you investigate.

Now it's time to Investigate the source of your own web article that you have found on your topic.