Most people evaluate media figures the wrong way. They ask: "Do I agree with this person?" If yes, trustworthy. If no, biased.
That's not a credibility assessment. That's a confirmation bias check.
Here are five questions that actually measure trustworthiness, regardless of whether you agree with the person's politics.
1. Do They Get the Facts Right?
This is the most important question and the one most people skip. Not "do they have good takes?" but "are their factual claims accurate?"
Check their major claims against fact-checking organizations like AP Fact Check, Reuters, or PolitiFact. Everyone gets things wrong occasionally, but a pattern of factual errors is a red flag that nothing else can offset.
2. Do They Correct Their Mistakes?
This is the most underrated indicator of trustworthiness. Everyone makes mistakes. What matters is what happens next.
Trustworthy figures correct errors openly, promptly, and prominently. Untrustworthy ones deny mistakes, stealth-edit content, or simply move on and hope nobody noticed.
A media figure who corrects their mistakes publicly is more trustworthy than one who never seems to make any, because the second one is almost certainly hiding them.
3. Do They Show Their Sources?
When someone makes a claim, ask: where did this come from?
Trustworthy figures cite primary sources: court documents, government filings, named sources, original data. They show you the evidence so you can evaluate it yourself.
Untrustworthy figures make assertions without evidence, cite "sources say" without naming anyone, or reference circular reporting where one outlet cites another outlet that cites the first outlet.
4. Do They Separate News from Opinion?
There's nothing wrong with opinion. Some of the best media is opinion and analysis. The problem is when opinion is presented as news without being labeled as such.
Trustworthy figures are clear about when they're reporting facts and when they're sharing their interpretation. Untrustworthy ones blur the line, presenting speculation as certainty, analysis as reporting, and personal opinion as established fact.
5. Are They Editorially Independent?
This is the hardest one to evaluate but possibly the most important. Ask: does this person ever say things their audience doesn't want to hear?
A media figure who only tells their audience what it wants to hear isn't a journalist. They're a performer. Genuine independence means being willing to challenge your own audience, report inconvenient truths, and resist the gravitational pull of audience capture.
Why These Questions Are Hard to Answer
If these five questions sound straightforward, the practice of answering them is harder than it appears.
First, most people do not encounter media figures in contexts that make these questions easy to evaluate. You watch a clip on social media. You hear a segment someone shared. You read a headline. None of these fragments give you enough information to assess factual accuracy, correction culture, or editorial independence. You need sustained exposure to a figure's work over time, and most people simply do not have that.
Second, confirmation bias makes self-evaluation unreliable. Research consistently shows that people are significantly better at identifying the flaws in sources they already distrust than in sources they already trust. If you like a media figure, you are more likely to give them the benefit of the doubt on questionable claims, to not notice when corrections do not come, to interpret editorial alignment with your views as independence rather than as capture.
Third, the media ecosystem has become sophisticated at mimicking the signals of credibility without actually being credible. Professional production values, confident delivery, citations of real studies taken out of context, the language of journalism without its standards: all of these can create a surface impression of trustworthiness that does not reflect the underlying reality.
This is why evaluating media figures requires systematic research rather than intuition. Your gut is being actively worked on. The five questions above are useful precisely because they force you to look for documented evidence rather than relying on how someone makes you feel.
How to Actually Research a Media Figure
If you want to evaluate a media figure on these five criteria yourself, here is a practical starting point.
For factual accuracy, search the figure's name along with "fact check" on Google. Look at what PolitiFact, AP Fact Check, and Reuters Fact Check have found. Look at whether claims they have made have been contradicted by primary source documents.
For correction culture, search their name along with "correction" or "retraction." Look at whether they have ever publicly acknowledged being wrong. Look at how prominently corrections appear relative to original claims.
For source transparency, look at whether their content links to or cites the primary sources they reference. Search their name along with "funding" or "sponsors" to understand their financial relationships.
For content integrity, look at whether opinion content is clearly labeled. Pay attention to whether emotional language and advocacy appear in segments presented as straight reporting.
For editorial independence, look at who funds them and whether their coverage consistently favors those funders. Look at whether they ever critically cover people or institutions their audience tends to support.
This research takes time. PressGrade does it systematically so you do not have to start from scratch every time you encounter a new media figure.
The Uncomfortable Truth About Your Favorites
One more thing worth saying directly: applying these questions rigorously to media figures you like is harder than applying them to figures you already distrust.
It is easy to catalog the failures of a media figure whose politics you oppose. It is much harder to honestly evaluate the correction culture of someone whose takes you generally agree with, or to scrutinize the editorial independence of someone who makes you feel understood.
But that is exactly the exercise. The point is not to confirm your existing distrust. It is to develop an accurate picture of who is actually operating with integrity, across the full spectrum of voices you consume.
That picture will probably be more complicated than you expect. Some figures you trust will score worse than you would like. Some you distrust will score better. That discomfort is a sign the evaluation is working.
Search any media figure on PressGrade to see how they score on all five criteria. The results might surprise you.
How PressGrade Uses These Questions
These five questions are exactly what PressGrade measures. We research the past 12 months of documented behavior for every media figure and outlet, scoring each of these dimensions based on observable evidence, not opinion.
You don't need PressGrade to ask these questions yourself. But if you want an evidence-based starting point, that's what we're here for.