I'm neither a journalist nor a professional fact checker but, the thing is, it's has never been easier to check basic facts. Yeah, sure, there's a world of misinformation out there, but it doesn't take much effort to determine if something is likely to be true.
There are brilliant tools like reverse Image Search which give you a good indicator of when an image first appeared on the web, and whether it was published by a reputable source.
You can use Google Books to check whether a quote is true.
You can use social-media searches to easily check the origin of memes.
There are vast archives of printed material to help you.
The World Wide Web has a million sites which allow you to cross-reference any citations to see if they're spurious.
Now, perhaps all that is a bit too much effort for someone casually doomscrolling and hitting "repost" for an instant dopamine hit. But it shouldn't be. And it certainly shouldn't be for people who write for trusted sources like newspapers.
Recently, the beloved actor Patricia Routledge died. Several newspapers reposted a piece of viral slop which I had debunked a month previously. Let's go through the piece and see just how easy it is to prove false.
Here's that "viral" story. I've kept to the parts which contain easily verifiable / falsifiable claims.
Wikpedia says that her birthday was 17 February 1929. She would have turned 95 in 2024.
Open up your calendar app. Scroll back to February 2024. What date was 17 February 2024? Saturday. Not Monday.
Now, OK, maybe at 95 she's forgotten her birthday. What else does the rest of the piece say?
In 1968, Patricia Routledge won Best Actress (Musical) at the Tony Awards - she was 39. I don't know if I'd consider appearing on Broadway as provincial stages.
Keeping Up Appearances was first broadcast in 1990. Patricia was around 60, not 50, when she was cast.
While she may have thought it would only be a small series - even though it was by the creator of Open All Hours and Last of the Summer Wine - there's no way that being the lead character could be described as a "small part". She wasn't a breakout character - she was the star.
Wikipedia isn't always accurate, but it does list lots of her stage work. She was working steadily on stage from 1999 - when she hit 70 - but none of it Shakespeare.
I was able to do that fact checking in 10 minutes while laying in bed waiting for the bathroom to become free. It wasn't onerous. It didn't require subscriptions to professional journals. I didn't need a team of fact-checkers. It took a bit of web-sleuthing and, dare I say it, a smidgen of common sense.
And yet, a couple of newspapers ran with this utter drivel as though it were the truth. The Independent published it as part of their tribute - although they took the piece down after I emailed them. Similarly The Express ran it without any basic fact-checking (and didn't take it down after being contacted).
Both of them say their primary source is the "Jay Speak" blog. There's nothing on that blog post to say that the author interviewed Patricia Routledge. A quick check of the other posts on the site don't make it obvious that it is a reputable source of exclusive interviews with notable actors.
The date on that blog post is August 2nd, 2025. Is there anything earlier? Typing a few of the phrases into a search engine found a bunch of posts which pre-date it. The earliest I can find was this Instagram post and this Facebook post both from the 24th of July - a week early than the Jay Speaks post.
To be clear, I don't think Jay Speaks was deliberately trying to fool journalists or hoax anyone. They simply saw an interesting looking post and re-shared it. I also suspect the Facebook and Instagram posts were copied from other sources - but I've been unable to find anything definitive.
I would expect that professional journalists at well-established newspapers to be able to call an actor's agent to fact-check a piece before running it. If they can't, I would have thought they'd do a cursory fact check.
But, no. I presume the rush to publish is so great that it over-rides any sense of whether a piece should be accurate.
This is irresponsible. Last week saw the BBC air an outright lie on Have I Got News For You. A professional TV company, with a budget for lawyers, fact checkers, and researchers - and they just broadcast easily disproven lies. Why? Maybe hubris, maybe laziness, maybe deliberate rabble-rousing.
The media have comprehensively failed us. They will repeat any tawdry nonsense as long as it keeps people clicking. It's up to us to defend ourselves and our friends against this unending tsunami of low-grade slurry.
I hope I've demonstrated that it takes almost no effort to perform a basic fact check. It isn't a professional skill. It doesn't require anything more than an Internet connection and a curious mind. If you see something online, take a moment to check it before sharing it.
Stopping misinformation starts with you.