Find Better Coverage

If your investigation of a source leaves you with any doubts, you need to keep digging. This means find more coverage of the claim: more trustworthy, more in-depth, more varied. One way to do this is to simply Google the topic and look for trusted news coverage. 

Google News 

You can head straight to Google News Links to an external site. to find more coverage. Scan the results for recognizable news organizations. Does their reporting corroborate the claim of your original source? If you land on a source you don’t recognize, return to the previous step: investigate that new source. If no recognizable and reputable news organizations have reported the original claim, you should be skeptical. 

Fact-Checking 

You can also look for coverage of a claim by a number of reliable fact-checking websites. (Remember that it was the professional fact-checkers in the Stanford study who were so good at spotting bad information.) 

A fact Links to an external site. is "a piece of information presented as having objective reality." To fact-check Links to an external site. is "to verify the factual accuracy of" a claim. As you practice your own fact-checking skills, you can rely on the work of professional fact-checkers. 

Here are some reliable fact-checking sites: 

  • PolitiFact Links to an external site.: Originally created by the newspaper The Tampa Bay Times and now run by The Poynter Institute, a non-profit school for journalists. PolitiFact’s focus is on checking for accuracy in politics.  
  • FactCheck.org Links to an external site.: Run by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Communication. FactCheck.org’s focus is on determining factual accuracy in the political realm so that voters can avoid “deception and confusion” in politics.  
  • Snopes Links to an external site.: The oldest fact-checking website, Snopes was originally known as The Urban Legends Reference Pages. Unlike the other two fact-checking websites, Snopes investigates urban legends, hoaxes, and popular culture in addition to current events and politics.  

Look for these fact-checking sites when you Google a claim you are checking. 

For fun, here Links to an external site. is a FactCheck.org piece debunking a claim about Snopes.