How Plainly Works

Everything on Plainly is one of two things, and we mark them visually so you always know which you're reading.

Aggregated headlines are links to reporting by established news organizations. We don't write them, we don't alter them, and clicking one takes you to the original publisher. The headline belongs to them; our role is curation.

Original reporting — Plainly Put and Where Things Actually Stand — is written by us. It carries the "Original Reporting" badge, and everything in this section of our standards applies to it in full.

We aggregate only from news organizations with long track records of accuracy, professional editorial standards, and public corrections practices: Reuters, The Associated Press, BBC News, NPR, PBS NewsHour, Politico, The Hill, The Guardian, CBC News, and Deutsche Welle, plus dedicated fact-checking organizations. We do not aggregate from anonymous sources, partisan advocacy outlets, or sites without corrections policies.

From every outlet, we aggregate news reporting only — never opinion or editorial sections.

An honest boundary: linking to a story is not certifying every word of it. Even the best newsrooms occasionally correct their reporting, and developing stories evolve. What we promise about aggregated content is the integrity of the source list — every outlet earned its place through demonstrated accuracy standards, and we review that list rather than chase traffic with lower-quality sources.

Verification. Every factual claim in Plainly Put is checked against at least two independent outlets before publishing. Names, numbers, and dates are verified, and when something is disputed or still developing, we say so rather than paper over it.

Primary sources first. Our fact-checks rest on primary evidence — court rulings, agency rules and data, official reports — before news coverage. Every fact-check ends with its full source list so you can retrace our steps. If you can't check our work, it's an opinion column, and we don't publish opinion columns.

Six verdicts, not two. We rate claims as TRUE, MOSTLY TRUE, TRUE BUT MISSING CONTEXT, DISPUTED/UNSETTLED, UNSUPPORTED, or FALSE. Reality is rarely binary, and a rating system that admits that is more honest than one that doesn't. When credible sources genuinely conflict, we say "disputed" — we don't pick a winner the evidence hasn't picked.

Claims, not people. We verify what was said, not who said it. We don't assign motives, and we try to explain why a false belief spread rather than mocking the people who believed it. Most misinformation is a real fact stripped of context or two similar things conflated — showing that respectfully is the job.

Neutrality by design. We describe what each side claims rather than taking positions. Our verdict badges avoid partisan color-coding. And we track the balance of what we choose to check — see below.

Fact-checkers are most often accused not of wrong verdicts, but of only checking one side. Our answer is the Balance Ledger: a permanent, automatically updated public record of every claim we've ever checked and where it originated. We can't hide skewed topic selection because the scoreboard is public. One clarification we hold ourselves to: the ledger promises balanced selection, not balanced verdicts. Verdicts land wherever the evidence lands.

Facts change: rulings get appealed, data gets revised, agencies reverse course. Every fact-check names, in advance, what would change its verdict — and when that happens, we update the verdict publicly, with a dated history of every revision on the page. Nothing is silently edited and nothing is memory-holed. A fact-check that can never be wrong isn't accountable; ours show their work over time.

When we get something wrong, we fix it visibly: a dated correction note on the piece itself, not a quiet edit. Corrections are a feature of honest journalism, not an embarrassment. If you spot an error in our original reporting, email us at corrections@plainly.news and we'll review it against primary sources.

Plainly is independently operated. It is not owned by, funded by, or affiliated with any political party, campaign, advocacy organization, or media conglomerate. Revenue comes from advertising and reader support, and no advertiser or sponsor has any influence over editorial content, verdicts, or what we choose to cover.

Aggregated headlines: trusted sources, honestly linked, clearly labeled. Original reporting: verified, sourced, balanced by design, corrected in public, and accountable over time. That's what the tagline means — not that we're infallible, but that everything we assert is checkable, and everything we get wrong gets fixed where you can see it.