After withdrawing websites from its ‘unreliable news’ index, International Fact-Checking Network withdraws index altogether

On April 30, the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) of the Florida-based Poynter Institute published UnNews: An index of unreliable news sites. Following complaints by news portals and readers, the index was withdrawn on May 2, citing “weaknesses in the methodology”.

The webpage now shows a 404 error.

The index originally listed 515 websites and relied on lists that were “public and curated by established journalists or academics”, and claimed to contain “original data (rather than information from other lists)”.

“To create the index, we combined five major lists … then eliminated the sites that were no longer active,” wrote Barret Golding, a podcast producer who led the project.

Three Indian websites made it to this index: Firstpost, Indiatimes.com and Postcard News. Firstpost was later removed from the list, citing a “review” of methodology which found it did not meet the “criteria for inclusion”.

After the index’s removal, Barbara Allen, the managing editor at Poynter.org, expressed regret in a “Letter from the Editor”:

Soon after we published, we received complaints from those on the list and readers who objected to the inclusion of certain sites, and the exclusion of others. We began an audit to test the accuracy and veracity of the list, and while we feel that many of the sites did have a track record of publishing unreliable information, our review found weaknesses in the methodology. We detected inconsistencies between the findings of the original databases that were the sources for the list and our own rendering of the final report.

Therefore, we are removing this unreliable sites list until we are able to provide our audience a more consistent and rigorous set of criteria…

This is not the first time that a study flagging “unreliable news websites” has come under scrutiny. In November last year, BBC had produced a study titled Duty, Identity, Credibility: ‘Fake News’ and the ordinary citizen in India to purportedly shed light on the false news industry plaguing India.

After getting slammed for erroneously including legitimate websites in this study, BBC had pulled down the report from its website to update “a section with details on the methodology”.

With these two major precedents, any future project with a similar undertaking must be filtered through a methodology that is rigorous and reliable. The yardstick of reliability used by media gatekeepers must also apply to themselves.