Our Core Principles
CrossChecked News was built on a single conviction: that the job of a news service is to report facts, not to frame them. We don't have an editorial line. We don't have a perspective to protect. We have a methodology — and we publish it in full.
These four principles govern every article on the site, without exception.
No article is published from a single source. Every story requires a minimum of 8 independently selected outlets, including at least 2 wire services as a factual anchor.
When sources disagree on facts, we don't resolve the dispute editorially. We flag it explicitly, show both claims side by side, and let the reader decide what to believe.
Every article shows all 8 sources with their credibility score and political lean classification. You can see exactly whose reporting shaped the synthesis.
Claude AI synthesizes facts — it does not opine, editorialize, or frame. The synthesis prompt explicitly prohibits opinion language, passive-voice framing, and emotionally loaded word choices.
The 4-Step Pipeline
Every article on CrossChecked News goes through the same automated pipeline. No human editorial decisions are made between story detection and publication. The methodology is the editor.
We monitor Reuters, AP, AFP, and the BBC live wire for breaking stories. A story is flagged for synthesis when it appears in 3 or more independent feeds within a 30-minute window. This threshold filters noise and ensures we only synthesize stories with genuine multi-source confirmation.
Once a story is flagged, the system selects 8 sources from our pre-vetted pool. Selection is not random — it is weighted to ensure political balance. Every article must include at least 2 wire services, at least 1 left-leaning outlet, at least 1 right-leaning outlet, and at least 2 center outlets. For regional stories, local outlets with relevant coverage are prioritized.
All 8 source articles are passed simultaneously to Claude (Anthropic's AI). Claude is given a strict synthesis prompt that instructs it to: report only verifiable facts, cite the source of each claim, flag any factual claim that is contested across sources, avoid all editorial language and framing devices, and produce a conflicts array listing every point of disagreement with source attribution on both sides.
The synthesized article is published with all metadata attached: the 8 source chips with credibility scores and lean classifications, the Cross Check Data bar showing average credibility, fact consensus percentage, and bias spectrum position, and the full Conflicts tab if any disputes were identified. Nothing is suppressed before publication.
Our Vetted Source Pool
All sources in our pool have been manually evaluated against our credibility scoring criteria. We review and update the pool quarterly. Sources are removed if their credibility score drops below 70 or if a pattern of factual inaccuracy is identified. Sources can be added by public nomination — see the FAQ below.
| Outlet | Type | Lean | Score | Used For |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reuters | Wire Service | CENTER | 98 | All stories — always included |
| Associated Press | Wire Service | CENTER | 97 | All stories — always included |
| Financial Times | Newspaper | CENTER | 95 | Economics, finance, geopolitics |
| BBC News | Public Broadcaster | CENTER | 94 | World news, politics, conflict |
| NPR | Public Broadcaster | LEFT | 93 | US domestic, health, science |
| The Guardian | Newspaper | LEFT | 91 | Climate, politics, UK/Europe |
| Al Jazeera English | Broadcaster | LEFT | 88 | Middle East, Global South |
| The Economist | Magazine | CENTER | 93 | Economics, policy, global affairs |
| Bloomberg | Wire/Newspaper | CENTER | 92 | Finance, markets, economics |
| Wall Street Journal | Newspaper | RIGHT | 91 | Finance, US politics, business |
| Jerusalem Post | Newspaper | RIGHT | 82 | Middle East (Israeli perspective) |
| Nature | Academic Journal | CENTER | 98 | Science stories only |
| The Lancet | Academic Journal | CENTER | 97 | Health and medicine stories only |
| Politico | Digital News | CENTER | 88 | US and EU political coverage |
How We Score Sources
Every source in our pool is assigned a credibility score from 0–100. This score is calculated from five weighted factors, reviewed quarterly by our methodology team, and cross-referenced against third-party press freedom and accuracy indices including the Reuters Institute Digital News Report, NewsGuard, and AllSides.
The five factors and their weights are: Factual accuracy rate (40%) — track record of published corrections and independent fact-check verdicts. Editorial standards (20%) — presence of a public editorial charter, corrections policy, and source verification process. Transparency (15%) — disclosure of ownership, funding, and conflicts of interest. Independence (15%) — freedom from state control or commercial pressure on editorial decisions. Longevity (10%) — years of continuous operation and institutional credibility.
How We Classify Political Lean
We classify each source as Left, Center, or Right based on their editorial positions on policy questions, not their ownership or funding. Our classifications are cross-referenced against AllSides Media Bias Ratings, Ad Fontes Media, and the Reuters Institute annual report. We review classifications annually and publish any changes.
The bias spectrum bar on every article shows the distribution of the 8 sources used, and marks where the synthesized article lands based on the weighted average of its source mix. A marker to the left of center does not mean the article is biased left — it means more left-leaning sources were included, which Claude is instructed to balance by weighting center and wire sources more heavily in its synthesis.
How We Surface Disputes
During synthesis, Claude is instructed to identify any factual claim that is reported differently across two or more sources. A conflict is flagged when the discrepancy is material — meaning it would change a reader's understanding of the event if they only read one version.
Conflicts are classified by severity. A HIGH DISCREPANCY means the two accounts are directly contradictory and irreconcilable from available source material — for example, casualty figures that differ by more than 20%, or binary factual claims where one source says yes and another says no. A MEDIUM DISCREPANCY means the accounts differ in framing or interpretation, but are not necessarily mutually exclusive. A LOW DISCREPANCY means minor differences in detail or emphasis that do not materially change the story.
CrossChecked never resolves conflicts editorially. When sources disagree, we present both claims with full source attribution and let the reader assess credibility. Our only editorial act is the severity classification.
About Claude AI
CrossChecked News uses Claude, built by Anthropic, to synthesize articles. Claude is a large language model trained to be helpful, harmless, and honest. We use the claude-sonnet-4 model, which as of early 2026 represents Anthropic's primary production model for complex reasoning tasks.
Claude does not write opinion. It does not have political views it expresses in outputs. It is given a detailed system prompt that constrains its outputs to factual synthesis only. The system prompt is published in full below for transparency.
What Claude does in our pipeline: reads all 8 source articles simultaneously, identifies the factual claims present across multiple sources, writes an original article in neutral language, generates a bullet-point summary, identifies factual conflicts with source attribution, and returns a structured JSON object with all content and metadata.
What Claude does not do: decide which sources to use (that's algorithmic), decide whether a story is worth covering (that's threshold-based), add any opinion or commentary, or make any editorial judgment about which side of a conflict is correct.
We are fully transparent that this content is AI-generated. Every article carries an AI disclosure with the synthesis timestamp. We believe AI synthesis, done with the right methodology, produces more consistent factual accuracy than human editorial chains subject to deadline pressure and individual bias.