HOW WE WORK
How CanadianWorldReport verifies what it publishes
Every claim carries a label and every number carries a classification. This page sets out what each one means, so a sentence can be weighed without taking our word for anything.
This is the verification methodology CanadianWorldReport applies to every article it publishes. Two things are stamped on the page rather than left to the reader's trust: the status of every material claim, and the origin of every number. Both are set out in full below. They are applied to four beats, conflict and security, sanctions and export controls, energy and chokepoints, and food and fertilizer.
Every claim carries one of five labels
A material claim is checked against a wire service or a primary document before it is written, not after. Where the primary source is reachable it is the one used: a Treasury designation notice rather than a story about it, testimony rather than a summary of testimony. The label printed beside the claim says which of those happened.
| Label | What it means |
|---|---|
| Confirmed | Independently verified. The confirming outlet and the date are printed. |
| Confirmed as reported | Verified as carried by a named outlet, rather than against the underlying document. |
| Confirmed against indexed excerpts | Verified against search-indexed excerpts of a piece rather than the whole piece. |
| Unconfirmed | One source, not corroborated. Marked so a reader can discount it. |
| Contradicted | Sources disagree and the disagreement is not resolved. Both versions are reported. |
An unlabelled claim is not published. The amber labels and the green one are deliberately different colours, because the distance between a claim checked against a document and a claim checked against a report of that document is the distance a reader is entitled to see.
Every number is measured, constant, or absent
Before a figure is published it is classified.
| Class | How it is reported |
|---|---|
| Measured | It comes from a live feed carrying a timestamp. The value and the timestamp are both printed. |
| Constant | A hand-assigned editorial value. It is reported as a classification with the date it was last reviewed, never as a movement and never as a change. |
| Absent | A figure computed from a feed that has stopped reporting is not published as a quantity at all. |
Dashboards present all three of those identically, as numbers on a face. We do not. A gauge that shows a stale value and a gauge that shows a live one look the same, and the difference between them is the whole question of whether the number means anything.
Two tests applied to every source
The origin test counts origins, not mastheads. Where a claim rests on several outlets, the question is whether that is several reporting chains or one event wearing several bylines. Two rewrites of one wire report are one source. A press release relayed widely is one source. A claim that resolves to a single origin on our own reading is published as Unconfirmed whatever the volume of coverage behind it.
The interest test asks who benefits from the claim. Is the source institutionally separate from the entity the claim is about, and does the claim cut for or against that entity's own interest. An audit body reporting its own government's failure is a statement against interest and carries high weight, whichever government it is. A military presenting its own new hardware is a statement in its own favour and carries low weight until it is independently corroborated, whichever military it is. The test is built to grade every state the same way, and it does.
What a party source can and cannot establish
The interest test governs whether a claim can be adopted as established. It does not govern whether the fact that somebody said, published or demonstrated something can be reported. Those are two different claims and they get two different labels.
Confirmed. A manufacturer publishes a specification for its own product. That the manufacturer states it is on the record, and needs no second source.
Not yet. That the product performs to that specification outside a demonstration the manufacturer arranged. That is a capability claim, and the interest test still governs it.
We print addresses and we do not link out
Body prose names its sources. The full address of every source is printed at the foot of the article in a box you can select and copy, like this one.
Methodology
There are no live links from our articles to other sites. A printed address is completely verifiable, and copying it is a deliberate act. The reader who takes the trouble is the reader who wanted to check, which is exactly who the address is for. Machine readers are served the same addresses through structured citation markup written into the HTML of every article.
Our images are charts, and they are built from the article
Every article image is a chart built from figures that already appear in the piece. Not stock photography, not wire photography, not a generated image of a real event. A chart assembled from sourced data is rights-clean by construction and it is the argument the article makes. A photograph of an oil terminal carries nothing, and it carries nothing at all to a reader who cannot see it.
Where this leaves a reader
Every sentence on this site can be traced. The label says how far the checking went, the classification says what kind of number you are looking at, and the address at the foot of the page says where to go and disagree with us. Our corrections policy covers what happens when the checking was not enough.