Terms of use.

The Baseline is published by Cory Hepler. These terms cover the website, the newsletter, the podcast, and reader accounts. They are written in plain language and mean what they say. Effective September 24, 2026.

Reading and citing the checks

Read freely; no account is needed. Quote a check, cite a verdict, or embed a link wherever you like, with attribution to The Baseline and a link back to the check. Do not republish whole checks as your own work, strip the sources from a check, alter a verdict, or present as ours a verdict we have not published. The press kit says how to use the mark.

Reader accounts

Signing in means an emailed one-time link; no password exists. You are responsible for the mailbox you sign in with. Following a public figure means an email each time a new check on them is published, and nothing else. We may close an account used to abuse the site, for example by flooding surveys or scraping at volume, and you can close yours at any time by asking. What we store and why is on the privacy page.

Surveys and comments

Reader surveys are opt-in, one response per browser, and are never presented as representative polls. Corrections and tips you send us may be quoted in a correction note or a check, without your name unless you ask for it.

Accuracy, and what we do not promise

We work to be right and we say so openly when we are not; see the corrections policy. Even so, the site is provided as is. To the extent the law allows, the publisher makes no warranty about it and is not liable for losses from relying on it. A verdict is a measurement of a claim against the public record on the date shown, not legal, financial, or medical advice.

Third parties

Headlines, polls, sources and videos we link to belong to their publishers and are governed by their terms. Linking to a page is not an endorsement of it.

Changes

When these terms change in substance, the date at the top changes with it and the change is logged in the newsroom notes. Questions go to the editor at coryh2014+baseline-hello@gmail.com.