Fact Checking, Verification & Fake News

Created by the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism to help journalists separate the real news from the fake.

Media Bias/Fact Check

According to the site, Media Bias/Fact Check (MBFC) is an independent online media outlet dedicated to educating the public on media bias and deceptive news practices. [More information on MBFC’s mission and methodology.] Media outlets are analyzed individually and assigned a grouping based on where they lie on the political spectrum (left, left-center, “least biased,” right-center, right). MBFC also categorizes some sources using additional categories: “pro-science,” “conspiracy-pseudoscience,” “questionable,” and “satire.”

PolitiFact

A good starting point for getting information on political and other “news” stories reported in the media, shared via chainmail, or posted by organizations on Facebook and elsewhere. This site provides an interesting “truth-o-meter” feature to rate the veracity of stories and claims made by politicians. More concretely, it also supplies the context that “soundbites” used to sway opinion are taken from.

Snopes

A long established source for checking on stories and claims made on the Internet. Some people claim Snopes has its own agenda when it comes to how it analyzes stories. As with all fact-checking sites, use Snopes as a tool to do your own research rather than merely relying on the conclusions you find there.

TruthOrFiction.com