At the bottom, it's a judgment call. As Nero Wolfe would say, "intelligence guided by experience." You have to use your own experience, knowledge, and above all, reasoning capability to ferret out what's true and what isn't. Same as for ANY sources of information.

It's difficult to nail down the process I use, which involves this plus a lot of intuition, but it has worked for me. Most of the time.

A few of many questions I ask myself:

--Does the writer have an axe to grind? Do his sources?

--What has the writer's past record of accuracy been?

--How many sources are there for the important data? Different sources. A surprising number of stories find their way back through other stories to one single source, like an inverted pyramid.

--Does the data check out if you actually look up the source yourself?

An amazing number of news stories sourcing some paper or document assume you will never go find the original, and don't link to it. This is true for "mainstream" press much more than more informal internet sites, which pride themselves on linking to original material. I've often dug up a source myself and found out that some serious "cherry-picking" has been going on. The internet makes this possible for anyone now. Before, try to imagine what you would have had to do to get a copy of a governent report, or a science paper from a university. I shudder to think how much crap has been foisted on us over the years by our prime sources of information simply because most people couldn't go look for themselves.

None of this guarantees you'll get it right--I've certainly been blindsided more than once--but it increases your chances. The link I gave in my first post has a lot of information, but you know what? If I were a reporter, I still wouldn't go to press on this one, either as "proved" or "disproved."

One good thing about the internet. As people look at the information flowing in, and realize the biases and errors built into humans telling a story, they are beginning to realize that the "conventional" media has been subject to this all along, and they're noticing it more often.

Dirty little secret: Just because a story shows up in the New York Times doesn't automatically make it more accurate.