Fact-Checking Policy
What happens before a story goes up
The reporter checks their own copy first, and the check is a list rather than a feeling. Every name spelled against a document. Every place located to a district, and to a panchayat where the story is about one. Every number traced to the paper it came from.
Then an editor reads the sources rather than only the sentences. Anything carrying a place name and a number goes past a second pair of eyes, a rule never bent for a deadline. A second editor is required for named allegations of wrongdoing, casualty figures, alert and holiday content, and anything about an identifiable private individual. On a fast-moving story we publish less rather than check less.
When the official numbers disagree
This is the everyday problem of covering Kerala in the monsoon, and it rarely involves lying. The weather department’s bulletin, the disaster management authority, a collector’s order, the police and a minister at a press conference can carry four different figures at the same hour, because they count on different clocks and sometimes count different things. Missing is not dead.
We do not average them, take the largest, or write “reports suggest”. Each figure is attributed to the body that issued it, with the hour, and where they conflict we say so and what each appears to be counting. Reservoirs get the same treatment: the level, the rule curve, the shutter position and the operator are four separate facts, and “dam nearing danger” collapses all four.
Bulletins are revised, so every update goes back to the current one instead of the list we used two hours ago. We learned that the expensive way, as our about page describes.
Primary sources, and what counts as one
In order of preference: the document itself, an on-record interview with somebody who has direct knowledge, a dataset we can open. The collector’s order rather than a summary of it. The Gulf ministry circular in Arabic rather than an agent’s account of what it means for your visa category.
Another outlet’s headline is not a source, and it produced the worst error this site has made. Where a Malayalam newsroom has broken something we cannot confirm, we credit them by name, say we have not confirmed it, and go looking for the document. When it stays out of reach, we say which document we asked for.
Links, so you can check us instead of trusting us
Stories link to what they rest on: the bulletin, the order, the judgment, the dataset. If a reader cannot get from a claim in our copy to the thing behind it in a click or two, the job is not finished.
Plenty of it is not online. Government paper here arrives as a photograph, a PDF behind a login, or paper. Then we describe it precisely enough for you to request it yourself: the issuing office, the date and the reference number.
Photographs, forwards and what readers send us
Every monsoon, footage of a flood somewhere else is forwarded as Kerala, and pictures from 2018 come back as this week. Before we use an image or a clip we run a reverse image search, read the file’s metadata where we have the original, and ask the sender for that original rather than the forward, which has been stripped of everything useful.
Then we try to place it: signboards, the language on the shopfronts, a bus route board. We want to know who shot it, when and where, and if that cannot be established it does not go up. Sometimes the honest line is that a clip is circulating and we have not verified it, and we say exactly that. We use no synthetic imagery of weather, damage or people, which our editorial standards cover.
A social post is a claim, and the account behind it has to be established before we quote it: when it was created, what else it has published, and whether the office it speaks for issued the statement at all. A screenshot of an official notice is the most reliable way to be wrong about Kerala. What readers send us is a tip rather than reporting, so we go to the document behind it. We do not identify a sender without asking, and we do not run a photograph from a feed as ours.
Statistics, studies and surveys
We go to the original data rather than the release about it, and the questions are always the same. Who collected this, when, how many people, what was asked, who paid for it, and does the finding support the sentence somebody wants us to write. An online poll of a few hundred people is not the state of Kerala.
Old figures presented as current are the local speciality. Health, literacy and migration numbers about this state get quoted from platforms for a decade after the survey that produced them. We put the year of the data in the sentence rather than a footnote, and we say whether a rate moved or the base did.
The same test for everybody
A claim from the chief minister’s office, the leader of the opposition, a state party office of any colour, a bishop, a trade union or an actor’s publicist is checked the same way. Prominence does not shorten the check and neither does our agreement with the claim. That an important person said a thing is one fact. Whether it is true is a separate one.
In an election season the volume of checkable claims rises and the standard stays where it is. We do not test one side’s manifesto arithmetic and let the other side’s alone, and we do not soften a check because an office returns our calls.
When a check fails after publication
Sometimes a claim survives everything above and falls apart the next morning. The mechanics are in our corrections policy: a dated note on the story at its own address, and anything in the safety category fixed as soon as the right version is confirmed.
We work to the principles the International Fact-Checking Network sets out, on non-partisanship, transparency about sources and methods, and open corrections. We claim no badge or membership. It is a code we hold ourselves to, and this page exists so you can check whether we do.
If you have the document that shows we got something wrong, send it to support@keralanews247.com with a link to the story.
Last updated: August 2026
