These are the rules MEFILES holds itself to. They are published so that a reader can check the work against them, and tell the editor when it falls short.
Sourcing
Every story cites the evidence it rests on, in the story, where the claim is made. Primary material — a statement, a filing, a tracked figure, a published photograph, a named official on the record — is preferred to a report of that material. Where only a secondary report exists, the outlet is named and the reader can weigh it accordingly.
- Numbers are attributed to the body that measured them. Where a figure is the only public measurement of something, the story says so, because that is a fact about the figure.
- Claims by governments are reported as claims. A ministry saying a thing happened is evidence that the ministry said it. The story distinguishes the two.
- Where a story cannot be verified, it is not published. Where a story is contested, the contest is the story.
Reporting and assessment
The two are visibly separated. The body of a story sets out what is known and where it came from. The assessment at the end is the editor's judgement about what it means, and it is marked as such. A reader who trusts the first and rejects the second is reading correctly.
Western Media Watch and Israeli Press Review are comparative desks: they quote the actual headlines and framing of named outlets, with links, and argue about the gap between them. They are criticism of published work, not of the people who produced it.
How this publication is made
MEFILES is produced by an editorially supervised automated pipeline, and it is better that you hear this here than work it out.
Each morning a scheduled job researches the last 24 hours to 7 days — the window varies by desk — across the ten standing beats. A language model drafts the stories against a fixed schema: headline, dek, body, cited sources, and a signed assessment. The output is validated, rendered, and published to this site. The editor sets the desks, their scope and their windows; reviews the edition; and stands behind the assessments under his own name.
What that means in practice:
- The judgement is the editor's. Assessments are published unsigned, over the publication, and MEFILES is answerable for every one of them. The reason the stories carry no personal byline is set out on the About page.
- The sources are real and linked. They are there to be checked, and checking them is the correct response to an automated publication.
- The method has limits. A model working from published material inherits what the published material got wrong, and it can misread a source or state something with more confidence than the evidence carries. This is the failure mode to watch for, and the reason the corrections policy below is not decorative.
- Volume is not the point. Ten desks, a fixed brief each, roughly a dozen stories a day. The pipeline exists to cover beats that a single analyst could not cover daily on his own — not to produce as many pages as possible.
Corrections
Send the story URL and what is wrong to editor@mefiles.news. You do not need to explain who you are.
- Factual errors are corrected on the story itself, with a dated correction note at the foot of the page saying what was wrong and what it now says. The original error is described, not silently overwritten.
- Material errors — ones that change what the story means — are corrected as soon as they are confirmed, and the correction is carried in the next edition.
- Minor errors (spelling, a mistyped date, a broken link) are fixed without a note.
- Stories are not deleted to resolve a complaint. A story that should not stand is corrected, or marked as withdrawn with the reason, at its original URL.
- If we disagree with you, you get a reply saying so and why.
Independence and conflicts
MEFILES is independently owned and self-funded. It takes no advertising, publishes no sponsored content, and has no institutional, state, party or corporate owner. Nothing on this site is paid placement. Where the editor has any interest bearing on a story, it is disclosed in the story.
Position
This publication is written from the Gulf and does not pretend to a view from nowhere. It has a stated interest in how the region is described by people who do not live in it. That is a declared position, disclosed here, and it is the reader's to discount.
Rights
Quote us with a link. For republication, syndication or translation, write to editor@mefiles.news. Third-party material quoted in these pages remains the property of whoever made it, and is used for criticism and comment with attribution.