How Journalists and Fact-Checkers Verify Claims and Spot Misinformation

Verification is the step between a claim circulating online or from an official and a claim being reported as fact. It is not a single technique but a set of overlapping checks that journalists and dedicated fact-checking organizations apply before publishing.

Starting with primary sources and documents

The basic method taught in newsrooms is to get as close as possible to the original record rather than relying on a secondhand account. According to the Granite State News Collaborative, reporters consult original files, public records, laws and spending documents directly, and request copies of underlying data from authorities rather than accepting a summary.

Where no document exists, such as in reporting on a disputed event, journalists are advised to interview multiple people independently and use cautious language like 'all evidence suggests' rather than asserting certainty. Editors then review names, figures and attributions before publication, and some newsrooms show sensitive sections of a story to sources beforehand to catch errors.

The rules certified fact-checking organizations follow

Organizations that want to be recognized as fact-checkers by the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), a unit of the Poynter Institute, must sign a Code of Principles built on five commitments, assessed annually by independent reviewers against 31 criteria.

• Non-partisanship and fairness: the same standard is applied to every claim, regardless of who makes it, and staff do not take policy positions.
• Transparency of sources: evidence is detailed enough for readers to replicate the check, with primary sources prioritized over secondary ones.
• Transparency of funding and organization: any funding source providing 5% or more of revenue must be disclosed, along with editorial structure and staff biographies.
• Transparency of methodology: the process used to select, research and publish fact checks is made public.
• Open and honest corrections: a published corrections policy is followed, and significant errors are visibly corrected.

Verifying images and video: OSINT techniques

A large share of misinformation spreads through photos and videos taken out of context rather than outright fabrication. Bellingcat, an open-source investigation group, describes checking five things before treating visual content as reliable: whether the image is original or has circulated before, who posted it and on what platform, where it was actually filmed (geolocation), when it was filmed (chronolocation), and why it was shared.

In practice this involves running a file through several reverse-image-search engines such as Google Images, Yandex and TinEye in parallel, since each indexes different parts of the web. Investigators also search distinctive visible details — a sign, a building, a uniform — rather than the whole image, and cross-check visible clues like shadows or landmarks against maps and known timestamps to see if the claimed time and place hold up.

The growing challenge of AI-generated content

Generative AI has changed the economics of this work. Tech Policy Press describes a core asymmetry: producing a convincing fake image, video or document has become cheap and fast, while verifying authenticity remains slow and resource-intensive, and detection tools become outdated every time generative models improve.

The same report notes that confidence scores from AI-detection tools — for example, a tool stating it is 70% confident an image is not AI-generated — do not translate into the yes-or-no judgment that publication requires, and that many such tools were built without input from journalists, limiting their adoption in newsrooms. A separate industry effort, the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), has developed cryptographic labels meant to track content from the moment it is captured, but Tech Policy Press reports that these labels are frequently stripped by editing software, content management systems or social platforms before an image or video even reaches audiences.

What readers can check themselves

The same core questions fact-checkers ask — who is the original source, where and when was this really captured, and does it appear anywhere else first — are the ones media literacy guides recommend to the public before sharing a claim. None of the organizations and guides reviewed here suggest a single tool is sufficient; all describe triangulation, cross-checking a claim against several independent primary sources, as the common thread.