Know Your Source: A Public Knowledge Store for Media Background Checks

MEDIAREF: Public knowledge store for reproducible media background checks in LLM fact-checking

Researchers introduce MEDIAREF, a publicly available knowledge store of web-sourced documents covering 200 media sources, designed to enable reproducible and low-cost media background check (MBC) generation for automated fact-checking systems. The work addresses a gap in RAG-based fact-checking pipelines where retrieved evidence is assumed reliable but may be biased or outdated. The authors evaluate widely used LLMs on the MBC generation task and show MEDIAREF supports higher-quality outputs than proprietary search API alternatives. The contribution is primarily a dataset and methodology for source-critical reasoning in fact verification.