Mercola Fact-Checking Guidelines

All Mercola articles are fact-checked, vetted and verified using Associated Press and Society of Professional Journalists journalism standards. Because we hold ourselves to the highest level of excellence and take responsibility for our work, we also follow industry best practices as recommended by the American Copy Editors Society for editing, proofing, writing and content.

We follow ethics principles recommended by the Associated Press Media Editors, and we even have adopted Associated Press style guidelines to distinguish our writing style from other health sites.

Therefore, when it comes to the topics we cover, we fact check every claim we make, and clearly identify sources, vet the people we interview and write about, and verify all medical information with referenced, hyperlinked, medical literature sources.

We do use news hooks gathered from mainstream print and broadcast media, but we don’t rush to print our version of the story in the name of a "scoop." Instead, we take time to investigate the article topic and dig deeper than what you see in other health and news sites — including mainstream news media — asking ourselves: Are the quotes accurate? Is there a backstory the news source missed that we need to share with our readers? Is the article accurate and honest?

To that end, we investigate the authors of medical and environmental studies headlined in the news so we can tell you what conflicts of interest they may have that could bias whatever it is they’re reporting. Because we also act as a watchdog over Big Industry and government, we take special care to look at the funding of studies and the lobbying behind legislation so we can expose questionable financial liaisons that ultimately affect your health and health care.

And, whether it’s a fun feature on nutrition or an in-depth investigation of Big Industry, we strive to gather all the facts possible, backed by research and investigative reporting, and relay them to you in a straightforward, conversational tone that you can understand and trust. In other words, we want you to know that you can depend on Mercola.com to tell a researched, factual, "rest of the story" that you won’t find anywhere else.

Content Researcher and Editor:

Cindy Bevington Olmstead is our content researcher and editor. Before joining Mercola.com, she worked more than 23 years in the newspaper industry as an investigative reporter, winning more than six dozen state and national awards — 44 of them first place — during her tenure. Many of her articles centered on health care industry topics, with her series on the HPV vaccine Gardasil, “A Big Public Health Experiment,” winning several first-place state and national awards, including a first-place award from Indiana Associated Press. Cindy is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists, Associated Press Media Editors (APME-ASNE), American Copy Editors Society (ACES: The Society for Editing) and the National Federation of Press Women.

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