Editorial Standards & Ethics

Why this page exists

Anyone can call themselves a news site. What a reader is owed is a plain account of how the news is actually made: where we get it, how we check it, and the lines we will not cross. This page is that account. It is not a wish list. It describes what we do, and where we fall short, our corrections policy is the visible record of us putting it right.

Sourcing, and showing our working

We prefer primary sources to secondhand ones: the document over the summary of the document, the official record over the report of it, the person who was there over the person who heard about it. When we can link you to the source, we do, because a reader should be able to check the ground under a claim rather than take our word for it.

We attribute. A story tells you who said a thing and how we know it, so you can weigh the claim yourself. We are careful to separate what we have confirmed from what someone has asserted, and we do not launder a single anonymous claim into a stated fact. Where a report rests on one source, we say so, and we treat a single unconfirmed source as a reason to keep reporting, not a reason to publish.

Verifying before we publish

A claim does not become a fact because it is interesting or because a rival ran it. Before a significant assertion goes up, we check it against the record, look for a second independent line where the stakes are high, and give a named subject of criticism a fair chance to respond. The detail of how we test claims is in our fact-checking policy. The short version is that we would rather be second and right than first and wrong, and at TL TALK RADIO that is a rule, not a slogan.

Keeping news and opinion apart

Reporting and opinion are different products, and a reader should never have to guess which one they are holding. News articles aim to tell you what happened as fairly as we can manage. Opinion and analysis are labelled as such, and they carry the honest argument of their writer rather than a neutral account. We do not slip a columnist’s conclusion into a news story, and we do not dress advertising as either, a line our advertise page holds firmly.

Anonymous sources and the people we report on

We grant anonymity sparingly, and only when the information matters and the source faces a real risk in giving it. When we do, we still test the claim rather than take it on trust, and we tell the reader as much about the source’s vantage point as we safely can. A promise of confidentiality is not casual. We do not identify our sources to anyone, advertisers and lawyers included, and we would rather drop a story than burn a source.

We try to treat the people in our stories as we would want to be treated in theirs. That means a right of reply for anyone facing a serious allegation, care with the grief and privacy of ordinary people caught up in events, restraint in naming the accused before a charge, and particular caution around children, victims of crime, and the vulnerable. Fairness is not softness. It is the difference between reporting and merely publishing.

Conflicts of interest, gifts and independence

Our judgement is the only thing we are really selling, so we guard it. Where a writer or editor has a personal, financial or family interest in a story, they declare it and step back, and the handover is recorded rather than agreed in a corridor. We pay our own way. Gifts, hospitality, free trips and the rest are declined or, where a review copy or accreditation is genuinely part of the job, disclosed. Advertising buys space on this site and nothing else, which is why it sits at arm’s length from the newsroom, as our ownership and funding page describes.

Images, data and generative tools

A photograph should show what it claims to show. We do not stage news images or alter them beyond honest cropping and basic tonal adjustment, and where an image is an illustration or a file picture we say so. We are careful with statistics, because a chart can mislead more quietly than a sentence. Where we use software tools, including generative ones, to assist with research or drafting, a human editor remains responsible for every published word and checks it against the standards on this page. The tool does not get a byline and does not get the final say.

Holding us to this

Standards on a page are worth nothing without a way to enforce them. If you think we have fallen short of what is written here, tell us at support@tltalkradio.org, and our contact page explains how to label it so it reaches an editor. We read complaints about our conduct as seriously as complaints about our facts.

Last updated: August 2026