This page explains exactly how Baynes World selects, researches, writes, and updates its fact-check articles — and why we believe the current fact-checking landscape needs a better model.
The Problem With Fact-Checkers
Before we explain how we do this, we need to talk about why it matters that we do it differently.
Fact-checking, as a journalistic practice, was supposed to be the immune system of the information ecosystem. The idea was simple: when viral claims spread faster than truth, someone with the time and resources to investigate should check the record and give readers a straight answer.
The problem is that the most prominent fact-checking organizations — Snopes, PolitiFact, the Associated Press Fact Check, the Washington Post Fact Checker — have themselves become partisan instruments. Not because they are staffed by bad journalists, but because they operate under the same pressures as every other media organization: institutional bias, advertiser relationships, audience expectations, and an incentive structure that rewards confirming what their readers already believe.
The result is fact-checks that cherry-pick which claims to investigate. That lead with a technically-true statement while burying the context that changes everything. That apply rigorous scrutiny to one side’s claims and generous framing to the other’s. That reach a verdict first and work backward to the evidence. That use the label “fact-check” to give the appearance of objectivity while producing something that is, functionally, opinion journalism with footnotes.
We have all seen it. A claim from the right gets rated “False” based on a narrow technical reading. A nearly identical claim from the left gets rated “Mostly True” with a note about context. The criteria shift. The standard moves. The bias is real and the outlets are not being honest about it.
So who fact-checks the fact-checkers?
That is not a rhetorical question. It is the question that led to this section of Baynes World existing at all.
Our Answer: Radical Transparency About How We Work
We are not going to tell you we have no bias. We told you on the Impartiality Pledge page that our founder Roe Baynes is right-leaning — and being right-leaning, he is most often playing devil’s advocate for the left on this site. That is not a contradiction. That is the discipline.
What we are telling you is this: we will show you every step of how we got from the claim to the verdict. Every source. Every counter-argument we considered. Every place where the evidence was ambiguous. You will be able to retrace our logic yourself, and if our read of the evidence is wrong, there is an email address at the bottom of this page where you can tell us so with your receipts.
That transparency is what separates a genuine fact-check from an editorial with a badge on it.
Why We Run a Fact-Check Section
The short answer: because viral misinformation and partisan spin are now indistinguishable to most people scrolling their feed, and the outlets claiming to solve that problem have become part of it.
Social media has created an environment where a post can reach millions of people in hours, be proven false in days, and still be believed by a significant portion of those millions months later. The correction never reaches as many people as the original claim. The algorithm does not care about accuracy — it cares about engagement, and outrage drives engagement far more reliably than truth does.
At the same time, traditional media has fragmented into ecosystems where each outlet serves its own audience’s priors. A story gets covered completely differently on CNN and Fox News — not because the facts changed, but because each outlet is selecting, framing, and emphasizing for a specific audience. Most readers only see one version.
The result is a world where people are not simply misinformed. They are living in entirely different factual realities, each one constructed from real events, selectively assembled.
Our fact-check section exists to cut through that. Not to tell you what to think. To show you what is actually verifiable — and what is not — so you can think for yourself.
How We Select Stories to Fact-Check
We do not fact-check everything. We fact-check claims that meet one or more of the following criteria:
Viral social media posts. Claims spreading rapidly on X, Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok — particularly ones that seem outlandish, that produce extreme emotional reactions, or that are being shared by high-follower accounts as if they are established fact. The faster something is spreading, the more important it is to verify.
Extreme claims in traditional media. When a major outlet, a politician, or a public figure makes a claim that sounds too clean, too convenient, or too one-sided to reflect the full picture, we investigate. This applies equally to outlets and figures on both sides.
Tips and requests from readers. If something is circulating in your feed and you are not sure whether to believe it, send it to us. We investigate reader tips and publish fact-checks based on them when the claim is significant enough to warrant it.
Claims that affect how people vote or what they believe about their government. We give priority to claims about elections, legislation, court rulings, and government policy — the areas where being misinformed has the most direct consequences for people’s lives and civic participation.
What we do not do is go looking for claims we already know the answer to, so we can produce a fact-check that confirms what we already believe. We go into every fact-check without a predetermined verdict. The evidence tells us where to land. If the evidence lands somewhere that makes us personally uncomfortable, that is what we publish.
How We Research a Fact-Check
Every Baynes World fact-check follows the same process:
Step 1: State the claim accurately and fairly. We find the original source of the claim — the original post, the original quote, the original article — and we state it in its strongest form. We do not paraphrase claims in ways that make them easier to debunk. If a claim has nuance, we present the nuance. Straw-manning the other side’s argument is not fact-checking. It is propaganda with a fact-check label.
Step 2: Find and state the most credible counter-claim. Almost every viral claim has a counter-narrative — usually the strongest version of the argument from the opposing perspective. We find it and present it with the same rigor as the original claim. There are, as the saying goes, three sides to every story: your version, my version, and the truth. We present all three.
Step 3: Build the documented record. We search for verifiable, corroborated facts that speak directly to the claim. Primary sources first — court documents, official government records, peer-reviewed research, legislative text, official statements. Secondary sources — credible news reporting from multiple outlets across the political spectrum — to corroborate. We do not use a single source as the basis for a verdict. We look for convergence across multiple independent sources.
Step 4: Evaluate where each side’s claims hold up and where they do not. We go through the claim and counter-claim line by line against the documented record. Where the evidence supports a claim, we say so. Where it does not, we say so. Where it is ambiguous, we say so — and we do not pretend it is less ambiguous than it is just to reach a cleaner verdict.
Step 5: Check for missing context, misleading framing, and selective emphasis. A claim can be technically true and fundamentally misleading. A statistic can be accurate and still create a false impression by omitting what comes before or after it. A quote can be real and still misrepresent the speaker’s meaning by removing surrounding context. These are the most common forms of misinformation in 2026 — not outright fabrication, but selective presentation. We look for them specifically.
Step 6: Reach a verdict based only on what the evidence supports. We do not reach a verdict and then go looking for evidence. The evidence produces the verdict. If the evidence is mixed, the verdict reflects that. If the evidence is overwhelming in one direction, the verdict reflects that. If there is not enough evidence to say with confidence, we say so — and we say it loudly, because anyone telling you there is a definitive answer to an unverifiable claim is lying to you.
Step 7: Show all of our work. Every fact-check ends with a complete source list. Every significant factual claim in the article is linked to its source. You can check every step. If you find a step we got wrong, the corrections email is open.
What We Look For: The Bare-Bones Facts Standard
Our threshold for including a fact in a verdict is simple: it has to be verifiable and corroborated by multiple independent sources.
If a claim cannot be independently verified, it does not go in the verdict. If it can only be verified by a single source with a stake in the outcome, we say so and note the limitation. If it comes from a primary document — a court ruling, a government record, an official transcript — we link to the document directly.
We separate verified facts from interpretations, and interpretations from opinions. You will always know which is which when you read a Baynes World fact-check. Verified facts are stated plainly and sourced. Interpretations are clearly labeled as analytical judgments, not established facts. Opinions — including ours — are labeled as opinion and kept in the sections of the article designated for that purpose.
Our Verdict System
We do not use a simple true/false binary because most significant claims in the real world are not true or false in any clean sense. They are combinations of accurate facts, missing context, misleading framing, and outright error — in varying proportions. Our verdict system reflects that.
Here is every verdict we use and what it means:
TRUE The claim is accurate, the framing is fair, and no significant context has been omitted that would change how a reasonable person interprets it.
MOSTLY TRUE The core of the claim checks out, but it is missing context or contains minor inaccuracies that affect the full picture without overturning the claim.
PARTIALLY TRUE BUT MISLEADING The factual elements of the claim have real merit, but the overall framing, context, or implication significantly distorts what is actually happening. The facts are being used to create a false impression. This is one of the most common verdicts in modern political media — technically defensible, functionally deceptive.
PARTIALLY TRUE BUT MISSING CONTEXT The claim is not false, but it is being presented without information that would substantially change how most reasonable people would interpret it. The missing context is the story.
PARTIALLY FALSE More of the claim is inaccurate than accurate. There is a factual kernel but the overall assertion is substantially wrong.
MOSTLY FALSE A grain of truth is buried in significant inaccuracy. The overall impression the claim creates is false, even if one narrow element holds up.
FALSE The claim is factually inaccurate. The core assertion does not hold up to scrutiny under the documented evidence.
PANTS ON FIRE Reserved for claims that are not only false but demonstrably absurd, clearly fabricated, or deliberately designed to deceive. This verdict is used sparingly and only when the evidence is overwhelming.
UNVERIFIABLE The claim cannot be confirmed or denied with currently available evidence. We will tell you what we were able to find and what we were not, and why. Anyone giving you a confident verdict on an unverifiable claim is not doing journalism — they are doing speculation with a badge on it.
OPINION, NOT FACT The claim is a value judgment, a prediction, or a normative position — not a factual assertion that can be verified or refuted. We will engage with the argument, but we will not pretend an opinion is something that can be fact-checked like a statistic.
SATIRE The claim originated as satire or parody but is being shared as if it were real reporting.
Verdicts We Will Rarely Give You
In practice, a significant portion of our fact-checks will not produce a clean True or False verdict. This is not a failure of the methodology — it is the methodology working correctly.
The claims that spread fastest on social media are almost never straightforwardly true or false. They are constructed specifically to resist easy debunking — built around a real event, framed in a way that creates a false impression, missing just enough context to mislead without technically lying. A clean True or False verdict on one of these claims is usually a sign that something is being oversimplified.
When we give you a complicated verdict, we are not hedging. We are being honest about what the evidence actually shows. If the most accurate answer is “this is partially true but the framing is deliberately misleading and here is the context that changes the picture,” then that is the verdict — because that is the truth.
Corrections and Updates Policy
We get things wrong. We will get things wrong. That is not a weakness of this site — pretending otherwise would be. Here is exactly what happens when we do.
Corrections: When we have published a factual error — a wrong date, a misidentified source, an inaccurate statistic, a quote taken out of context — the correction goes at the top of the affected article in bold, immediately visible to anyone who arrives at the page. The original error is acknowledged explicitly. We do not silently edit text and pretend the error never happened. Editing the historical record without disclosure is a form of deception, and we do not do it.
Updates: Stories evolve. Court cases get decided. New documents come to light. A claim that was unverifiable becomes verifiable. A verdict that was accurate on publication day may no longer fully reflect the facts a week later. When a story develops in a way that meaningfully affects our verdict or the factual record in our article, we add a clearly dated update to the article explaining what changed and why. The original verdict and reasoning remain visible; the update shows what is new and how it affects the picture.
Why this matters now more than ever: The modern news cycle is built around speed. Being first matters more to most outlets than being right. A story published at 8 a.m. to capture the morning news cycle will sometimes be substantially wrong or incomplete — and a correction published at 4 p.m. will reach a fraction of the people who saw the original. We understand that pressure. We try not to give in to it. When we are not ready to publish because we have not verified something, we wait. When we publish and later find we were wrong, we correct publicly and prominently rather than quietly.
Challenging our verdict: If you believe we have gotten something wrong — a factual error, a missed source, a misleading framing — contact us. Include the article URL, the specific claim or section you take issue with, and your evidence. We investigate every substantive challenge. We do not change coverage based on pressure. We change coverage based on evidence. If you have the receipts, we will look at them.
Corrections contact: corrections@baynesworld.com
Our Commitment to You
We built this section of the site because we believe you deserve better than what the current fact-checking landscape is offering. Better than predetermined verdicts. Better than cherry-picked evidence. Better than outlets that call themselves impartial while systematically favoring one side.
We are not going to tell you we are perfect. We are going to tell you that we are trying — genuinely, publicly, with our methodology written out on this page where anyone can point to it and hold us to it.
We will not always get to a clean verdict. We will always show you the work. We will tell you when someone is trying to mislead you. We will tell you what context is missing. We will tell you when there is not enough information to give you a definitive answer — because in this world where every outlet is racing to give you a definitive answer regardless of whether the evidence supports one, telling you “we don’t know yet” is one of the most honest things a journalist can say.
Our bias is disclosed. Our methodology is published. Our sources are linked. Our corrections are public.
You do not have to trust us. You have to verify us. That is the whole point.
— Roe Baynes, Founder Baynes World
This methodology page was last updated June 2026. If our practices change in any way that affects what is written here, this page will be updated with an explanation of what changed and why.
Related: Impartiality Pledge · Disclosure Policy · Submit a Tip or Correction