How to tell when a story is leaving out the other side

Quick answer: Count the voices. Then ask whether the people being criticized would recognize their own argument in the story. If they wouldn't, go find the original source before you share it.

In January 2019, a clip of about a minute went around the country. It showed a teenager in a MAGA hat and an older Native American man at the Lincoln Memorial, standing close, one smiling, one drumming. The caption most people saw told them what they were looking at. Thousands of people reacted to it within hours.

Hours-long footage turned up later. It showed an earlier scene that the short clip left out, including a separate group shouting at the students before the encounter began. Plenty of people had already condemned a teenager, Nick Sandmann, by name. Some outlets later corrected or updated their coverage, and some settled lawsuits with him.

Nobody in that story had to lie. They just had a minute of tape and a deadline. That's how most one-sided coverage happens, and it's why you can't catch it by hunting for angry adjectives.

Count the voices

Take any story about a dispute and do the arithmetic. Who's quoted by name? Who's quoted by description? Who's paraphrased? Who's missing?

A story with six named sources on one side and a line saying "critics disagree" has already told you which side the writer talked to. Look at where in the story the other side appears, too. Paragraph two and paragraph twenty-two don't carry the same weight, and most readers quit by paragraph ten.

Watch the phrase "did not respond to a request for comment." Sometimes it's honest. A reporter calls at 4:50 p.m. for a 5:00 p.m. deadline, gets no answer, and prints the line. That's a story that went to press without the other side while technically checking the box. Ask yourself whether the person was given real time and a real question.

Run the opponent test

This is the best check I know, and it takes thirty seconds. Picture the person or group being criticized reading the story. Would they say, "Fair, that's what I believe, and that's why"? Or would they say, "Nobody holds that view, that's a cartoon"?

When a story describes a position only through the people who oppose it, you're getting the argument as the opposition wishes it were. A fair account gives the position in terms its own supporters would use. Some stories on abortion, gun laws, immigration, or school curriculum do this well. Many don't. And it runs in every direction. A talk-radio segment that describes a progressive position in the most absurd terms available fails the same test.

Check who's talking in the quotes

Quotes tell you more than the paraphrase around them. Three things to look at:

• Quote or paraphrase? A paraphrase is the writer's summary. A quote is the person's words. A long quote can still be trimmed to a fragment. If the whole point of a story rests on four words in quotation marks, find the rest of the sentence.
• Named or unnamed? "Experts say" and "critics argue" are placeholders. Which experts? Which critics? There's a separate question about when anonymity is justified, and I've covered it in When an Anonymous Source Is Worth Believing, and When It Isn't.
• Who picked the expert? A think tank, a union, a manufacturer, and a university department all have something they'd like you to conclude. That doesn't make them wrong. It means the story should say who they are.

Go to the primary source

If a story hangs on a speech, a court ruling, a bill, or a report, find the thing itself. It's usually free and usually shorter than you'd think.

Take the Charlottesville press conference in August 2017. For years, the line "very fine people on both sides" was repeated alone, as if it settled the matter. Supporters of President Trump say the clip leaves out what he said in the same exchange, that neo-Nazis and white nationalists should be condemned totally. His critics respond that the "both sides" framing was the problem in the first place. You can have your own view on that. But you can't have an informed one from the clip alone. The full transcript is public, and reading it takes about ten minutes.

This works every time. Read the ruling, not the headline about the ruling. Open the bill, not the tweet about the bill.

Ask what the number is compared to

A statistic with no baseline is a missing argument. "Up 40 percent" could mean a jump from five to seven, or from five thousand to seven thousand. A story that gives you a percentage and not the starting count is hiding something, or hasn't looked. Ask three things:

1. Compared to what, and over what period?
2. Is it a count or a rate? Population changes the answer.
3. Who was measured, and who was left out?

The same check applies to a poll. How were the questions worded? Who was sampled? What was the margin of error? A two-point lead inside a four-point margin isn't a lead.

It cuts both ways

I'll give you my own view, labeled as one. I think the big national outlets miss the conservative side of a story more often than they miss the progressive one. That's one reason I teach this method. But my view doesn't excuse our side.

In 2023, Fox News settled Dominion Voting Systems' defamation suit for $787.5 million. Court filings in that case showed private messages from people at the network doubting claims that were being aired. A viewer who only watched one channel got a story missing a large piece of the facts. That's the same failure as the Covington clip, run by a different team.

If your method only catches the other side's mistakes, it isn't a method. It's a team jersey. A useful test of any outlet is how it handles being wrong, and I've written about that in How to Tell Which Outlets Actually Own Their Mistakes.

When there isn't another side

Be fair about this too. Some questions don't have two defensible positions. A story about whether the Apollo landings happened doesn't owe equal time to a person who says they were staged. Putting a fringe claim next to a settled fact and calling it balance misleads readers in the opposite direction.

So the test isn't "did they quote someone who disagrees?" It's "is there a serious, informed disagreement here, and did the story represent it?" On immigration levels, tax rates, school choice, and gun laws, there is. Serious people on both sides have real data and real arguments. A story that skips one of them is incomplete.

What to do with it

You don't have to become a full-time fact-checker. Build a short habit:

• Before you share something that makes you angry, count the voices.
• Ask whether the target would say "that's fair."
• Find one primary source. Just one.
• Give it a day if it's breaking news. Early reports are the most likely to be missing something. The editor's questions in The four questions an editor asks before a story runs are a good checklist.
• If your feed only ever serves you one side, that's a setup, not a coincidence. How Your Feed Decides What You See, and How to Take It Back covers that.

One last thing. The teenager at the Lincoln Memorial was a real kid with a real family who got a month of national contempt over a minute of video. Nobody needs to be that careful about everything. But before you hit share on a story about a person you've never met, you can spend ten minutes finding the longer tape.