Fact Checking Policy

Before anything goes up on IMN India, it goes through a basic set of checks. This isn’t a complicated process, but we follow it for every story, including the short ones.

Checking the source

If a claim comes from a government release, a court document, or a company statement, we name the source directly in the story or link to it. If it comes from another news outlet, we say which one, and we try to find at least one more source confirming the same facts before we run with it. We don’t repeat a single outlet’s reporting as if it were independently verified.

For crime and accident stories, we rely on statements from police or local officials. If the police haven’t confirmed something, like a death toll, a cause, or a suspect’s identity, we either wait or make clear in the story that the detail is still unconfirmed.

Numbers and quotes

Any figures in a story, such as amounts of money, casualty numbers, or statistics, are checked against the original source rather than copied from a headline or a social media post. Quotes are checked against the original statement or speech where one exists, instead of being lifted from another article.

Images and videos

We try to use original or properly licensed images. Where we use a photo or video that isn’t ours, we credit where it came from. If we’re not sure an image actually shows what it claims to show, which is a common problem with viral photos, we either verify it first or leave it out.

After we publish

News changes. If new information comes out after a story has gone up, like an arrest, an official denial, or an updated number, we go back and update the article, and we note when it was last updated. If we got something flat-out wrong, we correct it openly rather than deleting the article or quietly rewriting it.

Tell us if we’re wrong

If you think we’ve gotten something wrong, email contact@imnindia.in with a link to the story and what you think is incorrect. We’ll look into it, and if we made a mistake, we’ll fix it and say so.