Research Guides: COMM 101 (Fish): Source Evaluation

Find Balance In Your Sources

All Sides
Balanced news, diverse perspectives, and real conversation.
Ground News
You can see visually who’s talking about a story and who’s completely ignoring it.

C - Is the information current?

R - Is the information relevant/reliable?

A - Who is the author/authority?

P - What is the purpose/point of view?

There are many ways you can evaluate information. This list will provide you with a few various methods.

CRAAP Test
CRAAP stands for Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy, and Purpose. It is a checklist for evaluating a online resources such as websites.
DIG Method
DIG stands for Digital Image Guide.
Lateral Reading
Lateral reading helps you determine an author’s credibility, intent and biases by searching for articles on the same topic by other writers (to see how they are covering it) and for other articles by the author you’re checking on.

The resources below can help you do fact checking, evaluation and investigations of your own.

DomainBigData
Search in the IP address space and in all domain names to find ‘cyber fingerprint’ data on Internet.
Fact Check
Fact Check We monitors the factual accuracy of what is said by major U.S. political players in the form of TV ads, debates, speeches, interviews and news releases.
Google Image Search
Locate an image's original content by pasting an image URL or uploading a photo to use the Google image reverse search.
Politifact
This fact-checking journalism approach uses a Truth-O-Meter to gauge facts in political news by members of government and others in the political arena.
Snopes
Snopes posts popular news stories and fact-checks them for accuracy.