Fact-Checking Policy
The problem this policy solves
A site that covers breaking world news lives inside a specific tension: the moment a claim is most shareable is the moment it is least verified. False casualty figures, miscaptioned videos, fabricated statements and premature declarations all circulate fastest in the first hours of a major event, which are exactly the hours a 24-hour news desk is working. This page describes the checks a claim must survive before it appears on myworldnews24.com, and what we do when a claim matters but cannot yet be verified.
The core rule: find the origin
Every check begins with the same question: where did this claim originate, and can we reach that origin ourselves? A statistic attributed to a ministry is checked against the ministry’s own release. A quote attributed to a chief executive is checked against the transcript, filing or recording. A “study shows” claim is checked against the study, not the press release about the study, because the two disagree more often than either industry admits. If the chain from claim back to origin cannot be completed, the claim is either dropped or published with its incompleteness visible: “could not be independently verified” is an honest sentence and we use it.
Wire discipline
Much of world news reaches every newsroom, including ours, through news agencies and the reporting of established outlets. We treat that ecosystem the way wire desks traditionally have:
- A major claim carried by one outlet is a lead. Carried independently by two or more reputable organisations with their own sourcing, it hardens. Fifty outlets all citing the same single anonymous report is still one source wearing fifty hats, and we count it as one.
- We credit the originating outlet by name. “Reports say” without a name is banned on our desk, because it launders weak sourcing into false solidity.
- Speed pressure never overrides the count. Being an hour behind on a claim that proved false is not a cost; it is the system working.
Official statements are sources, not truth
Governments, militaries, police forces and companies are primary sources for what they said, and we quote them precisely. They are not automatically primary sources for what happened; officials have interests, and official figures in conflicts and disasters are revised constantly. Our practice is strict attribution with the issuer and time attached, comparison against other parties’ accounts where they exist, and explicit flagging when the only source for a dramatic claim is a party with a stake in it. When two governments assert opposite facts, we report the disagreement as the fact, rather than picking a side by lazy paraphrase.
Verifying images and video
Miscaptioned footage is the cheapest and most common form of misinformation after any major event: real video, wrong war, wrong year, wrong city. Before imagery anchors a story we apply the standard verification toolkit: reverse image search to find earlier appearances; frame-level comparison of landmarks, signage, vehicles and terrain against known imagery of the claimed location; weather and daylight checked against records for the claimed time and place; metadata where available; and provenance, meaning who first posted it and whether that account is plausibly connected to the event. Material generated or manipulated by AI is an accelerating problem, and our default has hardened accordingly: extraordinary footage without traceable provenance does not run, however compelling. When verified imagery matters to a story but arrived from a chaotic scene, the caption says what we verified and how far.
Numbers, studies and statistics
Numerical claims get their own checks because they fail in their own ways. We ask: what is the source dataset, what is the base of any percentage, is the comparison period fair, and does the astonishing number survive contact with the original table? Scientific and health claims are checked against the published paper: its sample size, whether it is peer-reviewed or a preprint, and whether the authors’ claims match the headline being attached to them. A single small study is reported as a single small study. Market-moving business claims are checked against exchange filings and official disclosures before we repeat them.
When verification and speed collide
Sometimes an event is plainly major but the details are unverifiable in the first hours. Our resolution is layered publication: we report what is established, with each unconfirmed element explicitly attributed and labeled, and the story marked as developing. What we do not do is fill the gaps with confident-sounding vagueness or lift precision from another outlet’s guess. Every unresolved flag in a developing story is a promise to keep checking, and the update trail described in our Corrections Policy is where that promise is kept.
Pre-publication checks, and who does them
Before publication, stories are reviewed by an editor other than the writer wherever the desk’s size allows, with a standing checklist: every name spelled from source documents, every number traced, every quote against its origin, every headline against the body, every image against its verification. On a small team the second pair of eyes is the single most valuable institution we have, and protecting it under deadline pressure is a management duty, not a luxury.
After publication
Fact-checking does not end at publication; readers across every time zone are, collectively, our largest verification department. Challenges to any factual claim reach us at support@myworldnews24.com with CORRECTION in the subject, are checked by an editor not involved in the original story, and are resolved as our Corrections Policy describes. The standards that govern the rest of the craft live in our Editorial Standards. None of this makes us error-proof. It makes errors rarer, shorter-lived and honestly accounted for, which is what a fact-checking policy can truthfully promise.
