Circular reporting explained

What circular reporting means

A claim can appear in many places and still rest on one person or one document. The repeats look like confirmation. They add no new evidence. NPR's accuracy guidance says that if other outlets are reporting something but they are all relying on the same single source, that should be a red flag ¹.

NPR's guidance warns against verifying facts through second sources such as other news outlets, and notes that incorrect information can be passed down from one news story to another ¹.

How one source becomes many

• A wire story is republished by many outlets, each under its own name. NPR asks staff to name the outlet a fact came from and says that media reports or sources say is not good enough ¹.
• A newspaper repeats another outlet's advance report. Guideline 2.3 of the German Press Code says whoever passes on such a report with the source named may in principle rely on its accuracy ⁷. The named source is what lets a reader find the origin.
• An intelligence report is passed between services and reaches analysts by more than one route. ICD 206 requires each citation to identify the originator, which can be a named source originator or the country of a liaison service ³.
• Unconfirmed items get repeated without a label. The German Press Code says unconfirmed reports, rumours and assumptions must be marked as such ⁷.

The Iraq weapons finding

The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction reported to the President on 31 March 2005 ². It said the daily intelligence briefings left an impression of many corroborating reports where in fact there were very few sources ².

The Commission said the 2002 estimate did not make clear how heavily it relied on a single source that no American intelligence officer had ever met ². It said several intelligence professionals had raised serious concern about that source, and linked the failure to poor asset validation practices and reliance on semi-cooperative liaison services ².

In the United Kingdom, the government's March 2005 response to the Butler review quoted the review's finding of weaknesses in how the Secret Intelligence Service applied its validation procedures ⁵. The government said work was under way so that source descriptions in intelligence reports use standardised terminology and are consistent ⁵.

What the published rules ask for

Checks a reader can run

• Look for the originator. ICD 206 lists the originator, a source identifier, a title and a date as required parts of each citation ³. The same fields help a reader of any report.
• Ask whether two sources are independent. The Washington Post policy says the two sources should be independent of each other, and that a relevant document can sometimes be the second source ⁴.
• Read the source summary. ICD 206 strongly encourages a statement on the strengths and weaknesses of the source base and on which sources are meaningfully corroborative or conflicting ³.