I'm neither a journalist nor a professional fact checker but, the thing is, it's has never been easier to check basic facts. Yeah, sure, there's a world of misinformation out there, but it doesn't take much effort to determine if something is likely to be true.
There are brilliant tools like reverse Image Search which give you a good indicator of when an image first appeared on the web, and whether it was published by a reputable source.
You can use Google Books to check whether a quote is true.
You can use social-media searches to easily check the origin of memes.
There are vast archives of printed material to help you.
The World Wide Web has a million sites which allow you to cross-reference any citations to see if they're spurious.
Now, perhaps all that is a bit too much effort for someone casually doomscrolling and hitting "repost" for an instant dopamine hit. But it shouldn't be. And it certainly shouldn't be for people who write for trusted sources like newspapers.
Recently, the beloved actor Patricia Routledge died. Several newspapers reposted a piece of viral slop which I had debunked a month previously. Let's go through the piece and see just how easy it is to prove false.
Here's that "viral" story. I've kept to the parts which contain easily verifiable / falsifiable claims.
Wikpedia says that her birthday was 17 February 1929. She would have turned 95 in 2024.
... continue reading