These Production-related questions are designed to help you assess the producers and distributors of the news story.
Do not use them all, but choose as many as will help you assess your chosen news report.

Return to the main triangle page.
Go to the Text page.
Go to the Audience page.

Who created this news?
What do searches reveal about the author’s authority and believability?

What can you discover about the distributor’s website/app?
Check the ‘About Us’ link and do a search for the website, reading others’ assessments of it.
Use whois.com to discover the owner and Snopes.com, Politifact.com and/or Wikipedia.com to assess the site’s reliability.

Where else has this news story appeared?
Are the other apps/sites known to you?
Are they reliable?

On which platform(s) is the news posted?
What might you infer about the news story’s purpose from knowing where it appears?

Does triangulation (searching multiple sites for the same news) result in validation or invalidation? I.e., does the news appear on many sites or just one? Are the other sites trustworthy?

Use key words to infer the news story’s purpose(s). Do you infer that the news story is intended to inform, to persuade, to shame, and/or to promote a specific worldview?

How might knowing the author’s and producer’s biases and purposes change your understanding of this news story?

Who might gain—and who might suffer—from the consumption of this news? How?

Return to the main triangle page.
Go to the Text page.
Go to the Audience page.