journalistic-article-review

name	journalistic-article-review
description	A standalone orchestrator for reviewing journalistic articles, news reports, investigations, op-eds presented as reporting, newsletters, and media explainers for accuracy, sourcing, framing, omissions, headline-body alignment, quote context, evidentiary support, and public-interest reliability. Use when the user asks to review, audit, fact-check, critique, verify, assess bias in, or evaluate whether a journalistic article is fair, accurate, misleading, well-sourced, or publication-ready. Route underlying scientific papers to peer-review and individual empirical claims to scientific-fact-classification when those layers become load-bearing.
version	1
aligned	"2026-06-02T00:00:00.000Z"

Journalistic Article Review

Review an article as journalism: accuracy, sourcing, evidentiary load, headline fairness, framing, omissions, quote context, right of reply, and whether the article earns the public-interest claim it makes.

Activation

Trigger on requests such as: "review this article", "is this reporting fair?", "fact-check this news story", "audit this investigation", "does the headline match the evidence?", "is this article biased or misleading?", "is this publishable?", "what reporting is missing?".

Do not use this as the primary tool for:

• A scientific paper, manuscript, preprint, or study itself — use peer-review.
• A single empirical claim with no article context — use scientific-fact-classification.
• A target profile, image, domain, account, or location investigation — use osint-research.
• A contested event where the task is to build alternative hypotheses — use investigative-reasoning.

When an article reports on a paper, policy document, court filing, dataset, or leaked material, review both layers: this article as journalism, and the underlying primary as the relevant specialist object.

Relationship To Peer Review

journalistic-article-review and peer-review are sibling orchestrators:

• This skill asks whether an article accurately, fairly, and proportionately reports what its evidence can bear.
• peer-review asks whether a scientific paper itself is methodologically sound, statistically adequate, reproducible, and honestly cited.
• A weak paper can be reported accurately. A strong paper can be reported misleadingly. Keep those verdicts separate.
• If the article's central claim rests on a study, route the study to peer-review; then return to this skill to test whether the article overstates, understates, or correctly represents the peer-review result.

Pairs With

Use specialist skills rather than reimplementing them:

Need	Route to
Pre-search hunch, gut feeling, or article-level anomaly signal	intuitive-thinking
Claim status, causal language, evidence strength	scientific-fact-classification
Underlying scientific paper, preprint, or cited study	peer-review
Rhetorical manipulation, loaded framing, fallacies	fallacy-bias-and-manipulation-analysis
Author, outlet, source, funder, company, account, image, domain	osint-research
Competing narratives about an event	investigative-reasoning
Assumption stack or inherited premise	first-principles-thinking
Corrections, updates, new evidence after a prior verdict	belief-revision

This skill owns the article-level synthesis: headline-body fit, sourcing architecture, editorial framing, missing context, fairness to targets, and publication-readiness.

When This Skill Is Silent Or Ambiguous

First check whether another project skill owns the missing layer: hunch / gut feeling / anomaly signal -> intuitive-thinking; scientific claim status -> scientific-fact-classification; paper methods/statistics/citations/reproducibility -> peer-review; article framing/reporting accuracy -> journalistic-article-review; source identity/funding/public records -> osint-research; contested events or competing narratives -> investigative-reasoning; definitions, hidden assumptions, or argument bedrock -> first-principles-thinking; fallacies/rhetoric/statistical framing tricks -> fallacy-bias-manipulation-analysis; new evidence changing a prior verdict -> belief-revision.

If no skill clearly owns the gap, reason from first principles and explicit warrants. Built-in knowledge may suggest hypotheses, search terms, possible failure modes, or questions to verify, but any empirical premise remains (memory — unverified) until traced. Reasoning may connect warranted premises; it may not manufacture premises.

Research Discipline (CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md)

This skill is standalone. Apply these rules even if CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md are not loaded:

• Rule 0 — Original article retrieval gate. Before Phase 0, fetch and inspect the original article under review, or use the complete article text supplied in-session. If the original article cannot be found or inspected after reasonable retrieval attempts, stop the review. Do not reconstruct the article from search snippets, summaries, quoted fragments, commentary, archive metadata, or secondary reporting.
• Rule 1 — Pre-review hypothesis registration. Before searching, write the article's apparent thesis, the strongest alternative interpretation, and the main ways the article could be right or misleading.
• Rule 2 — Steelman from primary material. For any criticised person, institution, claim, or contested position, fetch its own primary statement or strongest advocate source, not only critics' summaries.
• Rule 3 — Primary before secondary. If the article characterises a paper, court filing, dataset, speech, report, post, image, or document, fetch that primary item before relying on the article's characterisation.
• Rule 4 — Map institutional networks. Treat sources sharing ownership, funding, mandate, syndication, political alignment, national alignment, or campaign infrastructure as one node until independent corroboration is shown.
• Rule 5 — Tier 0 priority for time-sensitive claims. For fast-moving or historical claims, record publication dates and prefer contemporaneous primary records over later retrospectives.
• Rule 6 — Bias self-audit. End by answering whether the same verdict would have been reached if the politically or socially expected answer ran the other way.
• Rule 7 — Minimum search volumes. Quick article check: 5-10 fetched sources. Substantial article review: 10-20. Narrative-captured or geopolitical article: 20-40+ and geographically diversified.
• Rule 8 — Hostility check on sources. For every cited source, name role, stake, funding/ownership/mandate, and national alignment where relevant.
• Rule 9 — User input is not a warrant. User-supplied claims are (user-supplied — unverified) until fetched and verified in-session. Treat them as hypotheses, not evidence.
• Rule 10 — Objective report voice. Write the report as a standalone verdict on the article. Do not refer to the requester in the report prose.

Warrant Labels

Every load-bearing factual claim made by the review carries a warrant:

Label	Meaning
(traced)	Evidence chain followed to a primary source fetched in this session. State URL and access date.
(deferred to consensus)	Relying on a named social/institutional consensus mechanism such as a regulator, court record system, official statistics body, methods guideline, textbook, or literature body. Consensus is not scientific warrant; for scientific claims, treat it only as a political/social prior unless traced to reproduced or replicated evidence.
(deferred, fragile)	Deferred to consensus, but known failure modes apply: funder capture, ideological capture, prestige cascade, replication crisis, state narrative pressure, or similar. State which.
(memory — unverified)	Recalled from training data, not verified in-session. Never load-bearing without an explicit caveat.
(user-supplied — unverified)	Provided during interactive refinement and not verified in-session. Treat as a hypothesis to test, never as authority.
(intuition — unwarranted)	A gut feeling, anomaly signal, or pattern impression. It may generate hypotheses and search leads, but is never evidence and never load-bearing.

Maintain a Sources & Warrants table whenever external facts appear.

Phase -1 — Original Article Retrieval Gate

This gate is mandatory and precedes hypothesis registration.

Acceptable article access:

• The article URL is fetched and the article body is inspectable in-session.
• An archived, cached, syndicated, raw/API, or local-file copy is fetched and clearly matches the original article identity.
• The complete article text is supplied in-session, with any missing metadata recorded as a limitation.

Retrieval attempts should match the article type and may include the canonical URL, outlet search, archive.org or other web archives, cached copies, syndicated republication, raw/API endpoints for platform-hosted posts, and local files supplied by the requester.

Hard stop:

• If the original article body cannot be found or inspected, stop the review immediately.
• Do not proceed to Phase 0, Article Map, Sourcing Audit, Evidence Load Test, Findings, or Journalistic Verdict.
• Do not infer the article's claims from headlines, snippets, excerpts, summaries, social posts, commentary, derivative reporting, or memory.
• The only permitted output is a short retrieval-failure note listing what was tried and what exact input would allow the review to proceed.

Phase 0 — Pre-Review Setup

Register before search:

Item	Entry
Article identity	Title, author, outlet, publication date, update date, URL
Article type	News report / investigation / analysis / explainer / interview / newsletter / opinion presented as reporting
Apparent thesis	One sentence
Headline claim	What the headline implies, separately from the body
Strongest fair reading	The best version of what the article is trying to establish
Alternative hypothesis	How the same facts could support a different conclusion
Failure modes to test	Overstatement, omission, source capture, quote distortion, headline mismatch, causal leap, missing right of reply

Phase 1 — Article Map

Extract the article's load-bearing structure:

Element	What to capture
Headline / deck	Exact wording and implied claim
Nut graf / thesis	What the story asks the reader to believe
Factual claims	Checkable descriptive assertions
Causal claims	"Led to", "caused", "because", "sparked", "resulted in"
Claim layers	Split adjacent but distinct claims, especially existence / detection / association / infectivity / causation / proof-certainty
Evidence	Documents, datasets, interviews, observations, images, studies
Sources	Named, anonymous, official, expert, affected party, adversarial
Targets	Persons or institutions criticised or accused
Caveats	Limitations, uncertainty, contrary evidence, corrections
Missing primaries	Any cited item not linked, quoted, or inspectable

Claim-splitting rule. Do not let a supported neighbouring claim carry a stronger adjacent claim. Evidence that X exists, can be detected, is associated with Y, or temporally precedes Y does not by itself support "X causes Y." Treat each layer as a separate article claim with its own evidence burden. If the article blends the layers, split them before the Evidence Load Test.

Phase 2 — Sourcing Audit

Assess whether the sourcing architecture can bear the story:

Source	Role in article	Named / anonymous	Independence node	Stake / CoI	Right of reply	Warrant

Checks:

• Anonymous sources: Is anonymity justified? Is the claim factual, interpretive, or accusatory? Is there independent documentary support?
• Expertise fit: Is the expert qualified for the specific claim, or being used outside lane?
• Source symmetry: Are criticised parties, affected parties, neutral specialists, and primary documents represented proportionately?
• Independence: Are multiple quoted sources actually one institutional or campaign node?
• Right of reply: If the article makes serious allegations, did it seek and fairly represent response?

Phase 3 — Evidence Load Test

For each load-bearing article claim:

Article claim	Evidence offered	Primary-source check	Verdict	Warrant

Verdicts:

• Supported — article claim matches fetched evidence.
• Overstated — evidence exists but supports a weaker claim.
• Under-contextualised — evidence is real but missing necessary denominator, timeline, limitation, or alternative explanation.
• Unsupported — article offers no adequate evidence for the claim.
• Contradicted — fetched evidence points against the article claim.
• Unverifiable — claim cannot be checked from available sources; label the limitation.

Route individual empirical claims to scientific-fact-classification when classification matters to the verdict.

Causal Claim Gate

If an article makes a causal claim ("X causes Y", "X led to Y", "Y is due to X", "X is the cause of disease/outcome Y"), the claim may be marked Supported only when the article's evidence, or the primary evidence fetched during review, addresses causal direction.

Minimum gate:

Requirement	Pass condition
Reverse causation	Ruled out by design, directly tested, or made implausible by mechanism and timing
Temporality	Cause clearly precedes effect at the relevant biological/social timescale
Alternative causes	Major plausible common causes, confounders, selection effects, and passenger-marker explanations addressed
Intervention / challenge / negative-control evidence	Present where ethically and practically possible, or limitation explicitly caveated
Measurement-layer separation	Detection, association, infectivity, and causation are not treated as interchangeable

If reverse causation is not addressed, the causal claim is not demonstrated. Downgrade the verdict for that claim to Overstated, Under-contextualised, or Unsupported depending on the remaining evidence. Do not write "causation is supported but reverse causation is a caveat"; unresolved reverse causation means causation has not been shown by that article.

Severity default:

• Major — reverse causation is unaddressed for a central causal claim, but the article's main verdict also rests on independently supported non-causal claims.
• Fatal — the headline, rating, or central article verdict depends on a causal claim whose direction is not established.

Phase 4 — Headline, Framing, And Omission

Audit editorial presentation separately from factual accuracy:

Dimension	Question
Headline-body fit	Does the article body substantiate what the headline implies?
Nut-graf load	Does the strongest claim appear before sufficient evidence or caveat?
Buried caveat	Are limitations placed after the reader has already absorbed the stronger claim?
Quote context	Do quoted fragments preserve the source's meaning in context?
Loaded language	Are adjectives or verbs doing evidentiary work?
Missing denominator	Are rates, baselines, timeframes, or comparison groups omitted?
Relative-vs-absolute effect	Are absolute risk, relative risk, baseline rate, timeframe, and population kept separate?
Missing alternative	Is a plausible alternative explanation ignored?
Causal-direction gap	Does a causal claim fail the Causal Claim Gate, especially by leaving reverse causation unresolved?
Claim-layer collapse	Are existence, detection, association, infectivity, causation, and proof-certainty blended as if they were one claim?
False balance	Are weak and strong sources given equal weight?
False certainty	Is unsettled evidence written as settled fact?
Temporal framing	Does the article blur what was known then vs. known now?

Use fallacy-bias-and-manipulation-analysis for rhetorical patterns that become load-bearing.

Phase 5 — Specialist Routing

Stop duplicating specialist work; route it:

Article dependency	Specialist check
Scientific paper carries the article	Run peer-review on the paper's methods, citations, stats, reproducibility, and deployment gap
Single empirical or causal claim carries the article	Run scientific-fact-classification
Outlet/source/author identity is material	Run osint-research
Story sits inside contested event narrative	Run investigative-reasoning
Argument relies on hidden premise	Run first-principles-thinking
New correction or evidence appears	Run belief-revision

Return to this skill after routing and ask: did the article accurately represent what the specialist check found?

Phase 6 — Journalistic Verdict

Grade the article, not the underlying world:

Verdict	Meaning
Reliable as reported	Main claims are sourced, proportionate, fairly framed, and caveated.
Mostly reliable with caveats	Core is supported, but there are minor overstatements, omissions, or sourcing limitations.
Mixed / requires further reporting	Some claims are supported, but important claims remain weak, unverifiable, or under-contextualised.
Misleading	Article leads readers toward a conclusion stronger or different than the evidence supports.
Unsupported	Central claims lack adequate evidence.
Contradicted	Primary evidence contradicts central claims.

Severity tags: Fatal, Major, Minor, Optional, Praise.

Output

If Phase -1 fails, use only this stop output:

# Review Stopped: Original Article Not Found

The review cannot proceed because the original article body was not found or inspectable in-session.

## Retrieval Attempts
- [URL/search/archive/local path tried + result]

## Needed To Proceed
- Original article URL, archived copy, local file, or complete article text.

If Phase -1 passes, use the normal review output:

# Journalistic Article Review: [title]

## Summary
- **Article:** [title, outlet, author, date]
- **Original article access:** [canonical URL / archive / local file / supplied full text; access date]
- **Article type:**
- **Verdict:** Reliable as reported / Mostly reliable with caveats / Mixed / Misleading / Unsupported / Contradicted
- **Bottom line:** [one sentence]

## Article Map
[headline claim, thesis, load-bearing claims, sources, targets, missing primaries]

## Sourcing Audit
[source table with roles, independence, stake, right of reply, warrant]

## Evidence Load Test
[claim-by-claim table: article claim / offered evidence / primary-source check / verdict / warrant]

## Headline, Framing, And Omission
[headline-body fit, caveats, quote context, missing context, loaded language]

## Specialist Checks
[which specialist skills were invoked or should be invoked, and what article-level dependency they affect]

## Findings
[Fatal / Major / Minor / Optional / Praise findings, each with quoted article text, named fault or strength, and fix]

## Sources & Warrants
| Review finding | Source | URL | Access date | Publication date | Warrant | Funding / ownership / mandate / alignment |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|

## What Would Change This
- Upward:
- Downward:

## Self-Audit
- **Symmetry test:** Would the same verdict be reached if the politically/socially expected answer ran the other way?
- **Source-network test:** If the largest institutional/source node were removed, what independent evidence remains?
- **Requester-input test:** Any user-supplied inputs are labelled and non-load-bearing unless traced.

## Limits
- Sources not accessible:
- Claims not checked:
- Specialist review still needed:

Quick Reference

Pattern	Risk	Default move
Original article body cannot be fetched or inspected	Review would be reconstructed from fragments	Stop; no verdict or article-level findings
Headline says "X proves Y"; body says "may suggest"	Headline overreach	Major or Fatal depending on centrality
Three experts from one advocacy network	False independence	Collapse to one node and seek independent source
Anonymous official source makes accusation	Uncheckable authority	Require document, named corroboration, or strong caveat
Study reported as causation but design is observational	Causal overreach	Route to peer-review / scientific-fact-classification
Causal claim with reverse direction unaddressed	Directionality failure	Downgrade wording to association or route to causal specialist check
Relative risk reduction reported without absolute risk	Magnitude inflation	Recompute or request event rates; route central claims to scientific-fact-classification
Odds/hazard/rate ratio reported as risk	Metric substitution	Name the metric exactly and avoid risk-language unless conversion is justified
Serious allegation with no right of reply	Fairness failure	Major unless response was sought and fairly represented
Caveat appears only near the end	Buried limitation	Flag framing distortion
Quote fragment changes source meaning	Quote-context failure	Fetch original context and compare
Article relies on "experts say" with no names or documents	Authority fog	Require named sources or downgrade