Evaluating Information

My go-to response on checking the validity of information is 1) corroborate 2) check the responses from established, legitimate sources.
1) Corroborate - Information that is being reported from several sources is far more likely to be accurate. Check to see if the information is available from other sources. Sometimes a story will be essentially parroted from another source. If that is the case, look for another source for corroboration.
2) Check the established sources - Checking with long-established sources of reliable information, newspapers with a reputation for careful journalism, government, and university sources, these offer a consistent means of determining veracity.

However, this is an era of immediate access to information. Videos can pop up on the Internet showing events that are happening live, as happened with the recent insurrection at our Capital on January 6, 2021. Information like this is often difficult to verify. Whenever possible, I prefer to wait to see if other sources are reporting on the incident and if there is more than one person recording the incident.

Tags: Accuracy

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