What does the title tell you about the content?
Can you find information about the author?
What is the date? Is there a date?
Who is the intended audience?
How relevant is the resource?
How objective is the content?
Does the author document his or her sources?
Professional fact checkers don’t just look at the source they are reading to verify if it can be trusted. They do something known as lateral reading, which means investigating and verifying the source you are reading by:
You should do lateral reading when trying to determine if a source is valid and unbiased. You will definitely want to investigate a source before you use it in your paper or post it to your social media outlets.
To start your investigating, begin with the source you are thinking of citing and see if you can find out about the author and the website creators. Some helpful questions to ask are:
You can also go to the original sources that are being cited in a work to support the arguments and research.
After you are able to answer these questions and go to the source of a claim, you can continue to read laterally to find out what other people have said about the topic. This means that you would want to pull up other credible sources by different authors on the same topic and to see if the information being provided is similar to your original source.
In many cases, claims have already been fact-checked. Some places to look at are Wikipedia, Snopes, PolitiFact, and NPR’s own Fact Check website. These sources are nonpartisan and nonprofit websites that try to increase public knowledge and understanding by fact checking claims to see if they are factual or inaccurate or biased.
By doing lateral reading, you are checking whether the information in your source is confirmed or validated elsewhere and if the author has solid credibility. This form of external validation is a great complement to the ABC (authority, bias, currency) method which evaluates a source’s author and content.
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