Fact-Checking Policy
What we mean by checking a fact
Fact-checking at AN TV NEWS is not a separate department that inspects finished articles. It is the discipline built into how every story is reported: the habit of asking, before a claim goes up, how we know it is true and whether the evidence we have is strong enough to publish. On a breaking story, where the pressure to be first is at its worst, this is the discipline that keeps us honest.
The test is simple to state and hard to keep. We do not publish a claim of fact because it is being repeated, because it is trending, or because a rival has it. We publish it because we can trace it to a source we trust, and we tell you what that source is.
Primary sources, and the chain back to them
The strongest version of any fact is the one you can trace to its origin. So we work backwards from a claim to the primary source: the official statement rather than the report of it, the filing rather than the press release about it, the full ruling rather than a line quoted from it, the data set rather than the chart someone drew from it. Where we can reach the primary source we link to it, so you can check our work.
When a claim cannot be traced to a primary source, it does not get the same confidence, and the story says so. “According to a document we have seen” is a different statement from “according to posts circulating online”, and we do not let the second borrow the authority of the first.
Verifying claims as a story breaks
A breaking story is the hardest place to hold the line, because the facts are moving and everyone is shouting. Our rule is to separate what is confirmed from what is merely being said, and to publish the confirmed part while clearly marking the rest as unverified or developing.
- An official figure is attributed to the authority that issued it, with the time it was issued, because those figures get revised.
- A claim from a single source is labelled as such, and a serious allegation is not carried on one uncorroborated source alone.
- An image or video is not treated as evidence until we have satisfied ourselves it is real, from where and when it claims to be, and not recycled from an older event.
- Where we are repeating an agency flash we have not independently checked, we say so, following the wire discipline in our editorial standards.
If a claim cannot clear that bar in the time available, we hold it rather than launder it into a story with a soft verb. “It is unclear whether” is an honest sentence. A confident report of something we have not confirmed is not.
Numbers, quotes and images
Numbers get their own care because they look authoritative even when they are wrong. We check a figure against its source, we make sure the units and the timeframe match the claim, and we are wary of a statistic with no origin attached. A percentage with no base, a total with no date, a record with no comparison: each is a flag to slow down.
Quotes are checked against the fullest available record, so that a line is not clipped into meaning its speaker did not intend. Images and video are checked for provenance before they are published as if they show what they claim to show. In an era when a convincing fake is cheap to make, “it looks real” is not verification.
What happens when the check fails after publication
Sometimes a claim clears the bar, is published, and later turns out to be wrong, because a source was mistaken or an official figure was revised. When that happens we treat it as a correction, not an embarrassment to be buried. The story is fixed at its original address with a dated note that says what was wrong, and if the error travelled, the correction chases it. The full mechanics are in our corrections policy.
Getting a fact wrong and correcting it plainly is part of doing this honestly. Getting a fact wrong and hiding it is not, and we do not do the second.
Who checks, and how you can help
Because we are a small newsroom, the person who reports a story is responsible for standing up its facts, and a second editor pushes back on the load-bearing claims before publication, harder the bigger the claim. Nobody here is above being asked “how do we know that?”, and the question is not treated as an insult. It is the job.
Readers are part of this. If you can show that something we published is wrong, especially with a link to a primary source, you will help us fix it faster than any internal process. Write to support@antv.news with the link and the evidence, and other ways to reach the desk are on our contact page. We would always rather be corrected than be wrong in public.
Last updated: August 2026
