Editorial standards

Statements about what was or was not said on a recording are reports of the recording. Our reads of tone, candor, incentives and omissions are labeled as Wakewire's analysis, and we show the passages they rest on.

We describe what people said and did. We do not say why. We do not write that a host avoided, dodged, hid, buried, downplayed or spun something, or that a guest admitted or conceded it, unless the person used that word about themselves. An automatic check holds any read that uses these words for review before it can publish.

Sponsors, affiliations and disclosures named on a recording are reported as facts, with the place in the episode where they came up. When no disclosure was stated, we write "no disclosure was stated on the recording". We never write "failed to disclose". When a topic is missing we write "the episode did not address X", never that it was avoided.

Quotes are short, credited to the show or outlet, and link to the source. Our policy, pending counsel confirmation, is no more than 40 words in one quote and 150 quoted words across one episode, with quotes drawn from separate passages so they cannot rebuild a segment. When a quote has a readable source, it links to the exact passage. We do not publish transcripts.

Anything that did not come from the recording is kept apart from it and cited to where it came from.

Any read that could suggest wrongdoing by a named person is reviewed by a person before it is published.

A show, guest or company we write about can send a reply through the rights page. We publish it beneath the read, labeled as a reply, dated when we received it, and unedited except for length.

Publishers can ask us to stop covering a show, or to remove everything we have published about it. We honor robots directives and feed terms that prohibit automated processing.

Mistakes are fixed on the page and logged on the corrections page. How we verify quotes is set out in Methods.