Investigate the Source · Method

Purpose

Before you spend time on what a source says, find out who is saying it. A study from a university, a report from an industry group and a post from an anonymous account can all look equally polished. Knowing who’s behind each one tells you how to read it.

The fastest way to find out is to leave the page. Sam Wineburg and Sarah McGrew at Stanford watched 10 professional fact-checkers, 10 history professors and 25 Stanford undergraduates evaluate live websites. The historians and students mostly read vertically: they stayed on the site, read its About page, and judged it by its design, its logo and its domain name. The fact-checkers read laterally: after a quick look, they opened new tabs and searched for what other sources said about the site. They reached better-founded conclusions in a fraction of the time.

The reason is simple. A site’s own pages tell you how it wants to be seen. Other people’s descriptions of it tell you how it’s actually seen.

When you need it

You land on a site, channel or account you don’t recognize.
An organization’s name sounds neutral (“Institute,” “Center,” “Council,” “Alliance”) but you don’t know who runs it.
A source looks professional, with charts, citations and a .org address, and you’re tempted to take that as a sign of quality.
An article cites “a new report” from a group you’ve never heard of.
You need to know who funds a source before you weigh what it says.

How to do it

1Take a quick look, then leave

Glance at the page long enough to get the name of the site or organization, and the author if there is one. Don’t read the article yet, and don’t judge it by how it looks. Design, logos and domain names (.org included) are easy to buy.

2Search for the source, not the claim

Open a new tab and search for the organization’s name in quotation marks. Add a word that pulls in outside views: "Organization Name" funding, "Organization Name" who runs, or the name plus a reporter’s favorite word for it, such as think tank or lobby. If the site names a parent organization, search that too.

3Read the results page before clicking

Wineburg and McGrew call this click restraint. The fact-checkers in their study spent a moment scanning the results, reading the snippets and the web addresses, before choosing what to open. One skipped the first three results because they came from groups tied to the subject and opened news stories and Wikipedia instead. Skip the organization’s own pages and its ads. Prefer a news story, a reference entry or a public filing.

Watch for watchdogs with their own leanings. Sites that profile who funds whom are useful, but many are themselves run by advocacy groups: SourceWatch by the left-leaning Center for Media and Democracy, InfluenceWatch by the conservative Capital Research Center. Read both kinds if they turn up, and confirm what matters in documents.

4Use Wikipedia for orientation

A Wikipedia entry is a fast summary of what’s known about an organization, and its footnotes point to the news coverage and documents behind it. Read the summary, then check one or two of the footnotes for anything you plan to rely on. One fact-checker in the Stanford study went to Wikipedia, used the table of contents to jump to the section she needed, found a name, and moved on in seconds.

5Find the money and the people

For a US nonprofit, look up its tax returns (Form 990) on ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer, which lists officers and their pay and links to the filings themselves. For a company, look at its own disclosures. For a person, look at their other work and who employs them. You’re looking for who decides what the source says, and who pays for it.

6Decide what you now know

Sum it up in a sentence: “This is a site run by X, which is funded by Y and generally described as Z.” That sentence doesn’t tell you whether the claim is true. It tells you what kind of source you’re reading and how much more checking it needs.

Try it

Your task

Go to minimumwage.com and find the article “Denmark’s Dollar Forty-One Menu” (October 30, 2014). This page was one of the tasks in the Stanford lateral-reading study. Spend no more than five minutes finding out who is behind the site. Don’t judge the article’s argument: just answer who runs the site, who runs the organization behind it, and how you know.

Show a hint

Find the site’s own description of who runs it first. Then open a new tab and search for that organization by name, with words like “funding” or “who runs”.

Show the answer and the path

The path, as the fact-checkers in the study ran it:

The site’s footer and About page say minimumwage.com is a project of the Employment Policies Institute (EPI), which describes itself as a nonprofit research organization, founded in 1991, that sponsors research by economists at universities.
That’s the site describing itself, so leave it. A search for “Employment Policies Institute” in quotation marks returns EPI’s own site (and, when we tested, an ad for it) first, then outside sources: a Wikipedia entry, SourceWatch, InfluenceWatch and others. Careful with the initials: the Economic Policy Institute, a different organization that has argued for a higher minimum wage, is also called EPI, and a search with extra words can bring back its pages instead.
Those sources say EPI was founded by Richard Berman, and, citing a 2014 New York Times report, that EPI doesn’t have staff of its own: its staff work for Berman and Company, a Washington, DC, public affairs firm owned by Berman. Wineburg and McGrew describe Berman and Company as a public relations firm that lobbies for the restaurant and hotel industries. None of this appears on minimumwage.com itself.
ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer shows the related Employment Policies Institute Foundation’s tax filings, which list Richard Berman as president for several years.

How the groups in the study did: every fact-checker identified Berman and Company as the sponsor. Six of ten historians did, taking nearly twice as long. Forty percent of students did. The fact-checkers found EPI behind the site in under a minute on average.

What this tells you, and what it doesn’t: you now know minimumwage.com is a project of an organization run out of a firm that works for industry clients with a stake in wage policy. That’s essential context for reading the article. It doesn’t tell you whether the article’s argument is right. The same question about Denmark’s wages and food prices still has to be checked against better sources, which is the next move.

Common mistakes

Judging by looks. A clean design, a .org address and footnotes don’t tell you who runs a site or why. In the Stanford study, these were exactly the features that fooled the historians and students.
Reading the About page and stopping. An About page is the source describing itself. It’s where to start, not where to finish.
Searching in a way that brings back the source itself. Searching only the site’s own name often returns pages from the site. Put the name in quotation marks and add outside words like “funding.”
Treating “funded by an interested party” as “false.” Who pays for a source is a reason to read it carefully, not a reason to dismiss it. Rejecting a claim only because of who made it is a fallacy: see Ad Hominem.
Mixing up organizations with similar names. Two groups can share initials, or a name can be chosen to sound like a better-known one. Check that every result is about the exact organization you’re investigating.
Investigating the source and skipping the claim. A reliable source can get one thing wrong, and an advocacy group can get one thing right.

Limits

Lateral reading tells you about a source’s reputation, not about any one claim. A well-regarded outlet can still publish a mistake, and a source with an obvious stake can still be accurate. Use what you learn to set how hard you check, then check the claim itself with the next two moves.

What others say about a source can also be wrong or one-sided. Some of the most detailed write-ups of an organization come from its critics or its rivals, who have their own stakes. Prefer descriptions you can confirm in documents (tax filings, corporate records, the organization’s own disclosures) and coverage from outlets without a side in the fight.

Some sources have almost no outside coverage: a new site, a small local group, an anonymous account. Silence isn’t evidence either way. Say what you couldn’t find, and lean harder on the claim-checking moves.

Finally, funding records lag. Tax filings arrive a year or more after the fact, and ownership changes. Note the date of anything you rely on.