Media Literacy: What It Is and How to Judge a Source's Credibility

Anyone who searches for information online runs into articles, websites, and encyclopedia entries of wildly different quality every day. Media literacy is the set of skills that lets you read, judge, and use those sources with a critical eye.

What Media Literacy Means

UNESCO defines media and information literacy as the set of skills that lets people access, analyze, evaluate, and create content critically across different platforms. The UN’s education agency treats it as an essential skill for facing the challenges of the twenty-first century, including the spread of misinformation, hate speech, and declining trust in media and digital tools, generative AI included. Building this skill means learning to tell a fact from an opinion, recognize misinformation, and take part in civic life with more awareness.

A Five-Point Checklist for Judging a Source

The University of Chicago Library lists a five-point checklist, known as the CRAAP test, that traces back to Sarah Blakeslee, a librarian at California State University, Chico’s Meriam Library; in 2026 it’s one of the most widely used tools in university libraries.

• Currency: when the information was published, and whether it has been reviewed or updated since.
• Relevance: whether the content actually answers the question or topic you’re researching.
• Authority: who the author, publisher, or sponsor is, and what credentials they claim.
• Accuracy: where the information comes from, and whether it’s correct and verifiable.
• Purpose: why the content exists, to inform, teach, sell, entertain, or persuade.

Practical example: a page that promises a miracle cure while selling a supplement has a commercial purpose, not an informative one. The purpose criterion helps separate it from a peer-reviewed article, even when the tone sounds equally confident.

Online, the authority criterion gets more complicated, because it’s no longer an editor deciding what reaches readers first, but a recommendation algorithm that often rewards whatever drives clicks, not necessarily what’s accurate. Text drafted with the help of generative AI can look just as polished without that saying anything about its accuracy: the same five criteria still apply, starting with who published it and why.

FactCheck.org’s Eight Steps for Spotting a Fabricated Story

FactCheck.org, a U.S. fact-checking site, published an eight-step method in 2016, written by Eugene Kiely and Lori Robertson. In 2017, IFLA, the International Federation of Library Associations, translated it into dozens of languages and distributed it as an infographic to libraries worldwide, an example of how a method born on a single site becomes a standard an international body adopts.

1. Consider the source: figure out who publishes the site by checking the domain and its “about us” page.
2. Read beyond the headline: a provocative headline often doesn’t summarize the article accurately.
3. Check the author: a missing or generic byline is a warning sign.
4. Check the supporting sources: a story that cites official sources should still be checked, because sometimes those sources don’t actually back up the claim.
5. Check the date: some false stories are really distortions of real events, recycled out of context.
6. Ask if it’s satire: some content is labeled as such, but not always clearly.
7. Check your own biases: people tend to trust information that confirms what they already believe more readily.
8. Consult the experts: independent fact-checking sites have often already verified the same viral story.

Practical example: a story shared with a headline that sounds recent, but that describes something true that happened years earlier, makes readers think it just happened. Checking the date on the original article, not just the date of the post sharing it, avoids the mix-up.

These eight steps focus mainly on news stories. For the difference between misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation, and for the lateral-reading technique, the Recap How to Spot Fake News: A Practical Guide goes into more depth.

Is Wikipedia a Reliable Source?

The Wikipedia:Reliable sources guideline, written by the community that maintains the encyclopedia, asks entries to rest on published, independent sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy, favoring secondary sources over primary or self-published ones. An entry’s reliability, then, doesn’t depend on the platform itself but on the quality of the sources cited in its footnotes: an entry with many citations to independent publications is a different thing from one with thin sourcing.

The same guideline allows tertiary sources such as introductory university textbooks or encyclopedias, but stays cautious about self-published sources: they can be considered reliable only when the author is a recognized expert whose work on the subject has already been published by reliable, independent outlets, and never for information about living people. How Wikipedia’s editorial review actually works, entry by entry, is the subject of the Recap Is Wikipedia a Credible Source? How the Fact-Checking Works.

Finding Sources for School or University Research

The same five criteria apply when you’re gathering material for a school or university assignment: a site with an identifiable author, a stated date, verifiable references, and an informative purpose passes the test better than an anonymous blog or a sponsored page dressed up as an in-depth piece. Which tools work best for finding that kind of source in practice is the subject of a dedicated Recap on credible sources for research.

To get oriented among the institutions that produce official information, it can also help to understand how the Italian Constitution works or how the European Union is organized: both are examples of primary sources, often cited to verify news stories and encyclopedia entries about them.