The first report is a rough draft. Treat it like one.

Quick answer: In the first hours of a story, names, motives, body counts and legal outcomes are the facts most likely to change. Wait for confirmation from more than one independent source, and don't share a claim until you can say in one sentence where it came from.

On June 28, 2012, CNN and Fox News both told viewers the Supreme Court had struck down the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act. It hadn't. The Court upheld it, as a tax. Two networks with very different audiences made the same mistake inside a few minutes, because the opinion's opening pages said the mandate failed under the Commerce Clause and the part that saved it came later.

Nobody lied. Somebody read fast, under pressure, and stopped too early.

That's the pattern behind most wrong first reports. Understand it and you can protect yourself from nearly all of them.

Why the first version is the weakest version

Breaking news has a built-in problem. The people with the full picture are usually not talking yet. The people talking don't have the full picture.

Four things go wrong again and again.

Partial information gets reported as complete. On election night in 2000, the networks called Florida for Gore, pulled it back, called it for Bush in the early hours, and pulled that back too. The data was real. The conclusions ran ahead of it.

Sources are guessing. In January 2011, after the shooting in Tucson, NPR and other outlets reported that Representative Gabby Giffords had died. She hadn't. She survived. The error spread because it came from sources that sounded close to the scene, and everyone wanted to be right first.

One mistake gets copied. When CNN reported an arrest in the Boston Marathon bombing on April 17, 2013, the FBI said no arrest had been made. A claim repeated by five outlets can still be a single claim.

Pressure to name someone. The next day, the New York Post ran a cover with two men from the crowd photographs under the word "Bag Men," implying they were wanted. They weren't suspects. Online sleuths named a missing college student too, wrongly. Those are real people who had their names attached to a horror they had nothing to do with.

Notice that the errors cross the spectrum. This isn't a left problem or a right problem. It's a speed problem.

What changes first, and what rarely does

Not every fact in a breaking story is equally shaky. Learn the ranking.

Most likely to change:

• Who did it, and why
• Casualty and death counts
• How a court or agency ruled, in the first few minutes
• Anything described as "reportedly" or "according to sources"

Usually holds:

• That something happened, and roughly where and when
• Direct video or audio from the scene, once it's been confirmed as genuine and current
• Official statements, quoted in full, with a name and title attached

An official statement can still be wrong. Officials are working from the same fog. But you can at least point to who said it and hold them to it.

A waiting method you can actually use

You don't need to stay off the news. You need a short routine between "I saw it" and "I repeated it."

1. Find the verb. "Confirmed" and "is" are not the same as "reportedly," "appears to" and "sources say." If the key claim hangs on one of the soft ones, treat the story as a rumor with a byline.
2. Ask who saw it. Is the claim from someone who was there, from an official on the record, or from someone who spoke to someone? Each step away from the event, the odds of error go up.
3. Count independent sources, not outlets. Look for whether the second report adds anything new. If every article traces back to the same wire story or the same tweet, you have one source in several costumes.
4. Go to the primary document. If the story is about a ruling, a bill or a statement, find the actual text. Read to the end. The 2012 error would have been caught by reading to the end.
5. Check the clock. Look at when the story was published and when it was last updated. A report from ten minutes ago and a report from this morning can be about the same event and say opposite things.
6. Give names and motives a day. Don't share the identity of a suspect or a theory of why until it's been confirmed by someone with the authority to confirm it. If you're wrong, you can't take it back.
7. Come back for the correction. Good outlets fix errors and say so. Check whether the thing you read got updated, and see whether the outlet owns its mistakes or quietly edits.

That's seven steps, and you won't run all of them every time. Run the first three on everything. They take about a minute.

Where waiting is the wrong move

There's a real trade-off here, and it would be dishonest to skip it.

If a storm is coming, a road is closed, or police are telling people near you to shelter in place, don't wait for a second source. Act on the instruction from your local emergency management office or sheriff, because the cost of waiting is higher than the cost of being wrong. Waiting is for sharing and judging. It isn't for protecting your family.

And not every early report is shaky. A bridge is down. A plane crashed. You can believe the event and still hold the details loosely. That's the whole skill: believe the shape, wait on the specifics.

A note on trust

Commentary: Conservatives have plenty of reasons to distrust legacy media, and the record backs a lot of that distrust. But the answer to a press that gets things wrong isn't a feed that gets things wrong in your favor. If a story flatters what you already think, hold it to the same standard you'd use on a story that stings. The Post cover and the CNN arrest report were both wrong, and the same discipline would have caught both. A claim you're eager to believe is the one that needs the extra minute.

A friendly outlet that corrects itself is worth ten that never do. Look for the corrections page before you pick your sources. For more on how reporters weigh what they hear, see the four questions an editor asks before a story runs, and if a story rests on someone nobody will name, read when an anonymous source is worth believing.

The habit to keep

Next time something big breaks, notice the urge. The itch to be the first one in the family group chat is the same itch that put those errors on the air.

Put the phone down for an hour. Let the people with the facts catch up to the people with the cameras. The story will still be there, and it'll be closer to true.