General Information about Source Evaluation

Please read the page Evaluate your Sources from the San Diego State University Library for a general overview of source evaluation.

Evaluating Websites

As much of our research is now done online through the internet it can sometimes be difficult to determine which source is more credible than another. In a Stanford report on evaluating digital information, they took two professional organization websites on the same topic for students, professional historians, and professional fact-checkers to evaluate which is more credible. One organization was founded decades ago by medical researchers, the other by a hate group. Only the last group, professional fact-checkers, were able to determine the medical organization as being credible, whereas the others took too long or chose incorrectly. The Stanford report shows that even professionals can have a difficult time in determining the credibility of a professionally-made and well-written website (Wineburg and McGrew).

By doing a little more research using the four moves you can eliminate certain sources and find the best fitting ones to support your ideas on the topic:

1. Stop
2. Investigate
3. Find Better Coverage
4. Trace Claims

Be mindful that when following the four moves you do not fall down the “rabbit hole” of clicking that can deter your research and waste your time. Background on organizations, the author’s qualifications, and source information should be easy to find and take only a minute.

Stop

The first move is the simplest. STOP reminds you of two things.

First, when you first hit a page or post and start to read it — STOP. Ask yourself whether you know the website or source of the information, and what the reputation of both the claim and the website is. If you don’t have that information, use the other moves to get a sense of what you’re looking at. Don’t read it or share media until you know what it is.

Second, after you begin to use the other moves it can be easy to go down a rabbit hole, going off on tangents only distantly related to your original task. If you feel yourself getting overwhelmed in your fact-checking efforts, STOP and take a second to remember your purpose. If you just want to repost, read an interesting story, or get a high-level explanation of a concept, it’s probably good enough to find out whether the publication is reputable. If you are doing deep research of your own, you may want to chase down individual claims in a newspaper article and independently verify them.

Please keep in mind that both sorts of investigations are equally useful. Quick and shallow investigations will form most of what we do on the web. We get quicker with the simple stuff in part so we can spend more time on the stuff that matters to us. But in either case, stopping periodically and reevaluating our reaction or search strategy is key.

Investigate

The idea here is that you want to know what you’re reading before you read it.

Now, you don’t have to do a Pulitzer prize-winning investigation into a source before you engage with it. But if you’re reading a piece on economics by a Nobel prize-winning economist, you should know that before you read it. Conversely, if you’re watching a video on the many benefits of milk consumption that was put out by the dairy industry, you want to know that as well.

This doesn’t mean the Nobel economist will always be right and that the dairy industry can’t be trusted. But knowing the expertise and agenda of the source is crucial to your interpretation of what they say. Taking sixty seconds to figure out where media is from before reading will help you decide if it is worth your time, and if it is, help you to better understand its significance and trustworthiness.

Find Better Coverage

Sometimes you don’t care about the particular article or video that reaches you. You care about the claim the article is making. You want to know if it is true or false. You want to know if it represents a consensus viewpoint, or if it is the subject of much disagreement.

In this case, your best strategy may be to ignore the source that reached you, and look for trusted reporting or analysis on the claim. If you get an article that says koalas have just been declared extinct from the Save the Koalas Foundation, your best bet might not be to investigate the source, but to go out and find the best source you can on this topic, or, just as importantly, to scan multiple sources and see what the expert consensus seems to be. In these cases we encourage you to “find other coverage” that better suits your needs — more trusted, more in-depth, or maybe just more varied. In lesson two we’ll show you some techniques to do this sort of thing very quickly.

Do you have to agree with the consensus once you find it? Absolutely not! But understanding the context and history of a claim will help you better evaluate it and form a starting point for future investigation.

Trace Claims

Much of what we find on the internet has been stripped of context. Maybe there’s a video of a fight between two people with Person A as the aggressor. But what happened before that? What was clipped out of the video and what stayed in? Maybe there’s a picture that seems real but the caption could be misleading. Maybe a claim is made about a new medical treatment based on a research finding — but you’re not certain if the cited research paper really said that.

In these cases we’ll have you trace the claim, quote, or media back to the source, so you can see it in its original context and get a sense if the version you saw was accurately presented.

Identifying Bias

Most of us have biases, and we can easily fool ourselves if we don’t make a conscious effort to keep our minds open to new information. Psychologists have shown over and over again that humans naturally tend to accept any information that supports what they already believe, even if the information isn’t very reliable. And humans also naturally tend to reject information that conflicts with those beliefs, even if the information is solid. These predilections are powerful. Unless we make an active effort to listen to all sides we can become trapped into believing something that isn’t so, and won’t even know it.
— A Process for Avoiding Deception, Annenberg Classroom

Probably all sources exhibit some bias, simply because it’s impossible for their authors to avoid letting their life experience and education have an effect on their decisions about what is relevant to put on the site and what to say about it. But that kind of unavoidable bias is very different from a wholesale effort to shape the message so the site (or other source) amounts to a persuasive advertisement for something important to the author. Even if the effort is not as strong as a wholesale effort, authors can find many—sometimes subtle—ways to shape communication until it loses its integrity. Such communication is too persuasive, meaning the author has sacrificed its value as information in order to persuade.

While sifting through all the web messages for the ones that suit your purpose, you’ll have to pay attention to both what’s on the sites and in your own mind. That’s because one of the things that gets in the way of identifying evidence of bias on websites is our own biases. Sometimes the things that look most correct to us are the ones that play to our own biases.

Clues About Bias

Review the website or other source and look for evidence that the site exhibits more or less bias. The factors below provide some clues.

Media Bias: Left and Right

When describing potential bias in media reporting, people often talk about bias toward the “left” or “right”. The terms “left” and “right” appeared during the French Revolution of 1789 when members of the National Assembly divided into supporters of the king to the president’s right and supporters of the revolution to his left. Ever since, “left wing” has tended to refer to more progressive political positions and “right wing” to more conservative stances. In U.S. politics, the major divide between left and right has to do with the role of government: left wing politics supports more government intervention toward greater social equality, whereas right wing politics tends to favor a smaller role for government and greater economic freedom for individuals and businesses.

When reading or watching the news, it can be useful to know whether a particular media entity skews to the left or right. Political bias in one direction or another doesn’t make the news less factual or truthful, but it can change the emphasis of the coverage and the way certain issues are framed.

Take a look at this chart of Media Bias by Ad Fontes Media. Where does your usual news source fall on the political spectrum?

Works Cited

Wikipedia contributors. “The New York Times.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 28 Aug. 2021. Web. 2 Sep. 2021.

Wineburg, Sam, and Sarah McGrew. “Lateral reading: Reading less and learning more when evaluating digital information.” (2017).