Verification & Fact-Checking

At HeadLines Decoded, verification is not a final polish. It is how we decide what is ready to publish. Across every beat the standard is the same: claims are checked against evidence before they reach you, and when the evidence is incomplete, we say so plainly.

We publish for readers who want clarity in a noisy world. That means we do not treat a viral claim, a press release, a social post, or a single anonymous tip as proof on its own. We check, we attribute, and when needed we hold a story until the facts support it.

What we check before publishing

• Names, titles, dates, places, and figures, against the primary record wherever one exists.
• Quotes and attributions, against the original source rather than someone else’s summary of it.
• The central claim of the story, against more than one independent source when the claim is contested or consequential.
• Images, for what they actually show and where they came from, before we present them as real.

How we weigh sources

We go to the primary source: the filing, the transcript, the official report, the company’s own statement. Independent, on-the-record sources carry more weight than anonymous ones, and documents carry more weight than recollection. A claim that exists only in a forum post, a personal channel, or a single unverifiable tip is not something we report as fact, however plausible it sounds. It can point us toward reporting; it cannot be the reporting.

Images, video, and what spreads on social media

Some material needs extra scrutiny before it earns our trust. A photograph or video is checked for where it came from and whether it shows what it claims before we present it as real, and we do not pass off an unverified clip as documentary footage. A claim going viral on social media is a lead, not a fact: we trace it to its origin and confirm it independently before repeating it, because repeating a false claim, even to debunk it carelessly, spreads it. And because convincing fakes are now cheap to produce, we treat any image, audio clip, or quote we cannot source as unverified by default, however real it looks. When we use material created by someone outside the newsroom, we say where it came from.

When we are not certain

Some stories move faster than confirmation does. When that happens we tell you what is confirmed, what is estimated, and what is still uncertain, and we attribute contested claims to whoever is making them rather than adopting them as our own. Saying we do not yet know is more useful than pretending we do.

When we get it wrong anyway

Verification lowers the odds of error; it does not erase them. When something slips through, we fix it in the open under our Corrections Policy, and we would rather hear about it from you than leave it standing. Tell us through Feedback and Complaints.