Discovery Seminar - Economic Inequality - Ninkovic - Fall 2025

When doing research, you may read news articles to get background or up-to-date information on a topic. How can you tell if coverage of an event is comprehensive and reliable? Mike Caulfield, head of the Digital Polarization Initiative of the American Democracy Project, recommends applying the Four Moves or SIFT. These were designed to evaluate news stories and other posts.

 Stop

First, when you first hit a page or post and start to read it — STOP. Ask yourself whether you know the website or source of the information, and what the reputation of both the claim and the website is. If you don’t have that information, use the other moves to get a sense of what you’re looking at. Don’t read it or share media until you know what it is.

Quick and shallow investigations will form most of what we do on the web. We get quicker with the simple stuff in part so we can spend more time on the stuff that matters to us. But in either case, stopping periodically and reevaluating our reaction or search strategy is key.

 Investigate

You want to know what you’re reading before you read it.

Knowing the expertise and agenda of the source is crucial to your interpretation of what they say. Taking sixty seconds to figure out where media is from before reading will help you decide if it is worth your time, and if it is, help you to better understand its significance and trustworthiness.

 Find Better Coverage

Sometimes you don’t care about the particular article or video that reaches you. You care about the claim the article is making. You want to know if it is true or false. You want to know if it represents a consensus viewpoint, or if it is the subject of much disagreement.

Do you have to agree with the consensus once you find it? Absolutely not! But understanding the context and history of a claim will help you better evaluate it and form a starting point for future investigation.

 Trace to Original Context

Much of what we find on the internet has been stripped of context. When you trace the claim, quote, or media back to the source, you can see it in its original context and get a sense if the version you saw was accurately presented.

One piece of context is who the speaker or publisher is. What’s their expertise? What’s their agenda? What’s their record of fairness or accuracy?

In some cases these techniques will show you claims are outright wrong, or that sources are legitimately “bad actors” who are trying to deceive you. But in the vast majority of cases they do something just as important: they reestablish the context that the web so often strips away, allowing for more fruitful engagement with all digital information.

 The Bottom Line

The key thing to remember is that it's always a good idea to do some "external" searching after you read information of any kind - this means searching around for other sources that corroborate what you're reading, or provide more context.

Some information that can help you:

• Author: credentials, past work, motivation
  • Remember that authority based on experience and context: I am qualified to answer questions about librarianship or research, but I am not a good authority on Biblical scholarship, or experimental cancer treatments, as I have no experience in those fields
• Publisher: how long have they been around, what else do they publish
• Funding: who funded it, conflicts of interest
• References: are there any, what are they

How do you determine if the report you're reading is a reliable account?

Feeling unsure about something you just read? Try the Lateral Reading technique! Watch the video below for strategies to determine if information is reliable.