Research begins with broad inquisitiveness and ends with a reduction and articulation of some form of story or meaning. The first part, Fact Finding, covers both private research (such as through a public library) and collaborative research that encompasses interviews, verification, data entry and analysis. The second part, Source Comparison, involves the application of a skeptical mind to the gathered and verified facts.
Fact Finding
The Modern Researcher divides the fact finding process into: Finding the Facts, Verification and Handling Ideas, all of which are much easier than they were when the book was first published in 1957 [1]. Boston-area non-profit MuckRock provides a suite of free tools for making FOIA requests, filing & tracking FOIA requests, and annotating, sharing and storing documents once they become public.
Source Comparison
One useful guide for comparing news sources is Ad Fontes (which means “to the source” in latin). Ad Fontes provides a searchable database of the measured bias of hundreds of news sources, and the reliability of those sources is updated monthly based on their coverage of the news. Among the most highly rated sources of unbiased, original fact reporting were:
Ad Fontes provides extensive documentation on their methodology, but at a high-level it begins by reviewing thousands of individual articles from hundreds of publications to quantify how often each source presents verified facts or opinions. They then look at the extent to which those statements that are presented as facts are “easily provable and widely accepted” They also rate how well each article presents two sides of an issue, does not take a position, and advocates for a compromise between two sides.
Although it may be possible to see your favorite news source on the NASCAR-like map of logos above, it’s easier to search and compare across a small subset of news sources. This will yield a scatterplot of recent news articles from each source, as in the example below:
The dots represent individual articles from each source, which you can click on to see the article and decide for yourself whether your opinion of that article’s bias is close to the aggregate opinion of the many reviewers at Ad Fontes.
Additional Resources
- Barzun, Jacques, Graff, Henry F., “The Modern Researcher” Fifth Edition, Houghton Mifflin, 1992.