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Topic

Verification

In journalism and media, verification refers to a number of different, but related processes concerned with finding the truth ("veritas" in Latin). It's about investigating the facts/details of a story (fact-checking), examining pieces of content with regard to their validity, and establishing if the narrative holds up. Nowadays, journalistic verification is usually done with the help of search engines, digital maps, and lots of other tools. It has become increasingly complex, and there's a fair amount of overlap with other disciplines, e.g. digital forensics or the broader field of OSINT (open source intelligence, which refers to publicly available sources of information, not open source software).