A claim that reaches this desk has to survive three questions. What is the document? Who else, independent of the first teller, can confirm the part that matters? What are we not in a position to know? If the third question is the largest, the piece does not run as news. It may run as an essay that says it is an essay.
We do not invent a witness, a statistic, or an official who “declined to comment”. Silence from a person we never asked is not a fact. An anonymous certainty is not a fact either. Wire copy is not our copy. If the only source is a feed, the piece is labeled with that publisher and linked out.
Dates are Gulf time, Asia/Dubai, including when the source used another clock. We convert and we name the zone. A timestamp is part of the claim. So is the absence of one. A feed item with no usable time is dropped rather than given a time we made up.
Corrections go on the piece, with a new updated time, when the change is material. Taste is not a correction. A wrong name, a wrong date, or a sentence that outran its source is.