The invitation for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to speak at the Center for American Progress (CAP), a Democratic Party-oriented think tank, was controversial, coming amid charges that the group had dampened criticism of Israel to placate pro-Israeli funders (Intercept, 11/5/15).

To its credit, the think tank allowed staffers to post after the speech “10 Falsehoods That Netanyahu Told During His Appearance at CAP” (11/10/15), documenting deceptive claims made in the prime minister’s speech. The New York Times‘ Julie Hirschfeld Davis took a different approach, relaying the prime minister’s claims without question—even when Netanyahu himself urged listeners to check up on his assertions:

“It’s become an axiom that we are gobbling up land—we’re not,” Mr. Netanyahu said, asserting that no new settlements had been built in the past 20 years in Israel, and that the expansions had not “materially” altered the map. “Google this,” he implored the audience.

The New York Times has many more resources at its disposal than Google, but it’s someplace to start. The first thing that comes up when I searched for “no new settlements had been built in the past 20 years in Israel” is the Wikipedia article on “Israeli settlement,” which reported that after a “Road Map for Peace” was proposed international negotiators in 2002,

Israel’s settlement policy remained unchanged. Settlements in East Jerusalem and remaining West Bank were expanded. While according to official Israeli policy no new settlements were built, at least some hundred unauthorized outposts were established since 2002 with state funding in the 60 percent of the West Bank that was not under Palestinian administrative control and the population growth of settlers did not diminish.

The next item that Google produced was a factsheet from the hunger group Oxfam produced for the 20th anniversary of the 1993 Oslo accords between Israel and the PLO. This detailed the expansion of settlements in the decades that followed:

Israel has rapidly expanded settlements across the West Bank, including East Jerusalem: The number of Israeli settlers has more than doubled from 262,500 settlers in 1993 to over 520,000 today, across the West Bank, including 200,000 in East Jerusalem…. Expanding Israeli settlements now have control over more than 42 percent of the land in the West Bank. Today, there are more than 100 outposts…settlements established without official Israeli authorization. While demolition orders are sometimes issued by Israeli authorities they are seldom enforced, and outposts are often assisted by Israeli government ministries. They began to be established in 1996….

Making a small place smaller, the security perimeter [around Gaza] agreed on in Oslo has been unilaterally and progressively expanded by Israel. Today, Israel regularly uses live fire to maintain total control over the no-go area inside Gaza and around the perimeter of Israel…. As a result, up to 35 percent of Gaza’s agricultural land is largely unable to be cultivated.

After that, Google offered the Times article itself, followed by CAP’s own “10 Falsehoods” post, which included this: CLAIM: Netanyahu frequently says that no new settlements have been approved in the past 20 years, and repeated this claim on Tuesday. FACT: The 20 years claim holds up only by using superficial definitions of “settlements.” The government has long given settlers a long leash by allowing new construction in the vicinity of older settlements to be defined as “neighborhoods” and “outposts” when they are, in practice, new settlements, sometimes on Palestinians’ private land. In fact, the American Religious Right has bankrolled settlement construction, as ThinkProgress’ Jack Jenkins has reported. Settlement unit construction has continued steadily throughout the past decade despite Netanyahu’s claim that “there have been no new settlements built in the last 20 years.” Last year, as Secretary of State John Kerry attempted to broker a peace, Netanyahu’s government endorsed 13,851 new settlement housing units in the West Bank and East Jerusalem—four times the amount of previous years. Readers who followed Netanyahu’s advice to turn to Google, then, would be much better informed of the reality of Israel’s settlement policy than those who simply read the New York Times parroting his claims.

Which suggests that maybe it’s a good idea to doublecheck things you read in the Times, even when the source doesn’t urge you to do so. After all, the Times isn’t going to do it for you.