Find Better Coverage · Method · DoingResearch.net

Purpose

Sometimes you don’t care about the source that brought you a claim. You care whether the claim is true. Then the quickest route is to stop arguing with the post in front of you and go find the best coverage of the same claim somewhere else. Mike Caulfield’s version of this move is blunt: when the claim matters more than the article, ignore the source that reached you.

This works because most claims that reach you have been covered before. A viral photo has usually been checked by someone. A big news story has been reported by several outlets with their own reporters. A scientific claim has a field of experts who’ve written about it. You don’t have to find the truth alone. You have to find the people who’ve already done the work, and see whether they agree.

When you need it

You can’t tell whether the site that sent you the claim is reliable, and it doesn’t matter: you just want to know if it’s true.
A dramatic photo or video is going around during a breaking event.
A story is reported by one outlet and you want to know if anyone else confirms it.
A claim sounds scientific and you want to know where the experts stand.
You’ve investigated the source and it turns out to have a stake in the claim.

How to do it

1Boil the claim down to search terms

Write the claim in a few plain words: who, what, where, when. Leave out the post’s framing and adjectives. “Shark on flooded highway hurricane” will find coverage; “unbelievable footage they don’t want you to see” won’t.

2Search news across outlets

Use a news search (Google News, Bing News, or your search engine’s News tab) and look at who is reporting the claim, not just what the top result says. Wire services such as the Associated Press and Reuters send reporters to events and supply stories to many other outlets, so they’re a good check on whether something happened at all. If a big claim appears in only one place, that’s a finding in itself.

3Search for fact-checks

Add “fact check” to your search, or use Google’s Fact Check Explorer, which searches fact-checks published by organizations around the world. Many fact-checkers have signed the International Fact-Checking Network’s code of principles, which commits them to nonpartisanship, to naming their sources, to disclosing their funding and methods, and to publishing corrections, so you can see how they reached a verdict and check it yourself.

4Use Wikipedia for orientation

For a topic that’s been around a while, a Wikipedia entry gives you a quick summary of what’s known, what’s disputed and where the main sources are. Use it as a map, not a final answer. Follow its footnotes to the sources for anything you plan to rely on.

5Find the specialist sources

For a scientific, medical, legal or statistical claim, look for the people whose job it is: professional bodies, government agencies that collect the data, review articles, university researchers who study the subject. One specialist source that explains its evidence is worth more than ten general ones repeating each other.

6Reverse-search photos and videos

For an image, search with the image itself. Google Lens and TinEye find other copies of a picture across the web. TinEye can sort results by the oldest copy it has found, which often leads to the original photo and its real context. For a video, take a screenshot of a distinctive frame and search that.

7Look for agreement

Lay out what the good sources say. If independent outlets, fact-checkers and specialists agree, you can usually stop. Check that they’re really independent: ten articles that all repeat one wire story are one source, not ten. If good sources disagree, that’s worth knowing too. Record what’s settled and what’s still open, and don’t pick the side you prefer.

Try it

Your task

A photo shows a shark swimming beside a car on a flooded highway. It goes around during hurricane after hurricane, captioned as the storm of the moment. Don’t try to judge the photo by looking at it. Find better coverage: what do fact-checkers and other sources say about it, how far back does it go, and where did the shark come from?

Show a hint

Search for a few plain words like “shark highway hurricane photo.” Then try a reverse image search with Google Lens or TinEye, sorted to show the oldest copies.

Show the answer and the path

The photo is a fake: a composite, made by pasting a shark from a real photograph into a picture of a flooded road. The coverage agrees across many independent sources.

PolitiFact rated the claim “Pants on Fire” when it spread during Hurricane Harvey in Houston in August 2017. It traced the image back to at least 2011, after Hurricane Irene hit Puerto Rico, and found it had resurfaced with Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and other storms since.
The shark appears to come from a photo by Thomas Peschak, published in Africa Geographic in 2005, of a great white shark following a researcher’s kayak off South Africa. National Geographic later published the story of the photo, with Peschak’s comments on how it was copied into fakes.
Wikipedia’s “Hurricane Shark” entry summarizes the history: the freeway image and other street-shark claims were all debunked for more than a decade, until a video from Hurricane Ian in Florida in 2022 showed a large fish, possibly a shark, in a flooded yard. The Associated Press confirmed that video was genuine, though experts disagreed on the species.
When we tested a reverse image search, Google Lens returned dozens of matches, mostly fact-checks and news stories calling the photo fake, from outlets including Snopes, USA Today and The Washington Post.

The path is the lesson. Staring at the photo tells you little. Two minutes of searching shows that many independent sources looked into it years ago and agree.

Common mistakes

Fighting the source instead of finding coverage. You can spend twenty minutes arguing with a post’s evidence. Five minutes of searching may show it’s already been settled.
Counting echoes as agreement. Many outlets republish the same wire story or copy each other. Check whether each source did its own reporting.
Searching with the post’s own words. Loaded phrases bring back pages that share the post’s framing. Search for the plain event.
Treating one fact-check as the last word. Read how the fact-checker reached its verdict, and see whether other checkers agree.
Reading “no coverage” as “false.” A claim nobody has covered yet may be new, local or obscure. Absence of coverage means you have more work to do, not an answer.
Stopping at the first reverse-image match. The top result isn’t always the oldest or the original. Sort by date and look for the earliest credible copy.

Limits

This move depends on someone having done the work before you. During breaking news there may be no good coverage yet, and early reports are often wrong. Sometimes the right answer is to wait.

It also depends on the search results being good. Researchers Michael Golebiewski and danah boyd describe data voids: search terms so rarely used that the few pages matching them can be dominated by people with an agenda. Searching an unusual phrase from a post can lead straight back into the same circle of sources. Use plain, general words, and check who published each result.

Agreement among good sources is strong evidence, not proof. Experts and journalists have been wrong together before, and a consensus can shift as evidence comes in. What this move gives you is the current state of the best available knowledge, which is usually the right place to start. Whether the evidence behind it holds up is a different question: ThinkingCritically.net covers judging it. Watch also for the opposite trap, reading only the coverage that agrees with you: see Cherry-Picking.

Reverse image search only finds copies that a search engine has indexed. A brand-new image, or one shared only in private groups, may return nothing. And tools change: what Google Lens and TinEye can do today may not match what they do next year.