Does Jimmy Kimmel Live! have an exclamation mark? This was a question our technology columnist Leah Grossman and I had to answer when we fact-checked her latest column. It seems easy to answer. Just type “jimmy kimmel live” into your favourite search engine, hit query and skim the AI-generated summary, right? Not for us.
At The Ubyssey, we practice the magazine-style fact-checking described by the Truth in Journalism Project. We verify every fact with a footnote: name spellings, dates, quotes and so much more. (This piece has 58 fact-checking footnotes.) The process is thorough; a fact is rarely verified after the first page of search engine results. Our process also never starts or ends with an AI-generated answer. The Ubyssey never uses generative AI in any stage of its newsgathering, reporting or editing process.
For facts that are substantively important to a story, we search for the most authoritative source. Sometimes, this is easy: the pillars of the AI for All report can be found in the corresponding official report, and the amount AMS Council spent on legal fees last year can be found in the AMS budget.
But sometimes an authoritative source is less obvious: how do you verify that the Blue and Gold Society is not incorporated as a society under the BC Societies Act? You can’t just Kagi search “is blue and gold society a society.” It requires knowing that the BC government maintains a searchable database of registered organizations called OrgBook. Searching “Blue and Gold” on OrgBook doesn’t turn up the Blue and Gold Society, so it’s not a real society. Consider that fact checked!
Facts that are less material to the story are still fact-checked, but we are comfortable verifying them with a newspaper or encyclopedia entry rather than tracking down the most authoritative source.
Which facts are substantive and which are not varies from story to story. The fact “Canvas uses American servers” is substantive in a story about the aftermath of this year's Canvas breach, because that story is about Canvas’s management of UBC data. To verify this, our news editor interviewed a cybersecurity expert, and multiple members of our newsroom independently traced the IP addresses called by canvas.ubc.ca. This fact’s veracity was critical for the story’s discussion of data residency.
If the story were instead about how a Canvas update deleted students’ grades and assignment submissions (a hypothetical example), the focus would likely be on how students, instructors and the university were trying to move forward — not the specifics of Canvas’s infrastructure. Because of this, a fact about the location of Canvas’s servers would be less material to the story, so we’d be comfortable confirming its veracity using a news article rather than hunting down experts.
If we can’t verify a fact, we don’t publish it. When I was reporting on last October’s Rally for SkyTrain, I learned information from conversations with volunteers that I didn’t publish because I didn’t record or document those interactions.
If we get something wrong, let us know. When we make an error, we correct it and acknowledge our error at the bottom of the story.
Every section of our newsroom employs the same rigorous fact-checking. In Sports, we verify which player scored the final goal when Canada lost against Morocco. In Arts, that there was a Handsome Squidward rug at Khatsahlano. In Culture, how much whey powder sales increased, and in News, just how many Friendlier containers have been used.
Some readers are quick to draw a line between work published in the Opinion section and the “real” journalism of other sections. To these readers, opinion “content” bears no allegiance to the truth, and “opinionators” are licensed to say whatever they want, regardless of factuality. To them, little separates an opinion essay from a Reddit post. This is not true.
Opinion, too, is fact-checked.
The work published in the Opinion section is journalism and is thus held to the same standards of rigour, ethics and accuracy as the rest of our report. We draw no distinction between the quality of the reporting published in the Opinion section and any other section.
I’m often asked how it’s possible to fact-check Opinion — isn’t everything just an opinion? Not quite. An opinion essay intends to make an argument, but that doesn’t preclude it from containing facts. Indeed, opinion essays regularly have over 100 facts. Some are immaterial to the story — like the spelling of Mark Carney’s name — and are verified quickly, but some material facts take longer to verify — Grossman and I spent hours combing through U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings to determine if both David and Larry Ellison own a significant stake in Paramount Skydance.
Why go through all this work to fact-check for Opinion? A quick answer would cite our newsroom-wide commitment to accuracy and truth. This answer would be correct, but incomplete.
The rigour of fact-checking serves the arguments of the authors who write opinion essays. If a reader disagrees with the proposition of an opinion essay, it shouldn’t be because the author said something verifiably untrue about Discord’s age verification. The disagreement should come from weighing differently the competing privacy concerns and societal responsibilities involved in age verification.
More than anything, the rigour of fact-checking serves our readers. Political discourse today can be noxious, filled with baseless accusations and personal attacks amid an ocean of bullshit. Not just politicians, but online debaters and influencers often have no allegiance to the truth — only to inciting their audience.
You deserve better.
The opinion essays you read in The Ubyssey seek to stand apart from the chaos of our modern media landscape by platforming fact-based, informed opinions about the topics that matter to our community. Opinion journalism can contribute to depolarizing communities by publicly deliberating local issues with respect. Doing so requires opinion journalism to be grounded in the truth.
