Guide · Evidence
How to check campaign sources
Provenance, population, dates and limitations: four checks to run on any claim before it reaches a pitch.
Provenance: where did it come from?
Identify whether the data is first-party, public, purchased or scraped. Each is acceptable if labelled honestly. Unlabelled is the red flag.
Population: who is in it?
Find the sample size and who it represents. Compare the headline’s language to the population: words like everyone, nationwide and typical need a population to match.
Dates: when was it true?
Look for collection dates and publication dates. Data collected long ago may still support a historical angle but not a claim about today.
Limitations: what is it not?
Good campaigns state their own limits. Where none are stated, write them yourself and decide whether the claim survives them.
- Self-selected responses
- Small subgroups
- Correlation presented as cause
- Rankings that depend on arbitrary weights
Record what you find
Keep a short note per claim: source, population, date, limitation, confidence. It makes later rechecks quicker and any editor questions easy to answer.