Research current through October 3, 2026.

Episode 2: America’s Missing Receipts

Sketch News is a satirical animated series built on reporting, and its episodes are short, so they compress. This page is the hub for the research behind this episode: one page per story, our sourcing and grading rules, and our corrections policy.

The three stories

• Funerals: the price you have to chase. The ownership of funeral homes, the price studies, the FTC’s work and one big chain’s settlements.
• The inaugural committee: the payment you can see. The filing, our tally of the donors at one million dollars, and why timing is not proof.
• Senate money: the payer you can’t see. How two linked organizations differ on disclosure, why one donor list is out of reach, and the funders traceable through their own paperwork.

There is also the corrections page, with every correction we know of, including the ones caught before the episode went live.

How each story page is built

Every story page has the same five parts.

1. What the episode said: one paragraph, with the episode’s claims linked to their sources.
2. What we found: the fuller story, in plain prose, with each factual sentence linked to its source.
3. What the episode compressed: the places where a short episode simplified, with the fuller version.
4. What we couldn’t prove (and where we looked): dead ends, exhausted searches and open edges, set out plainly.
5. Sources: the full list, with grades.

How we source and grade

Every factual sentence has a source link, and every link has a grade, displayed as a small letter beside it.

• A: primary record. A filing, court record, statute or government release, or a party’s own statement made public, used only for what that party can know.
• B: two independent outlets. Two independent news or trade outlets confirm the claim, or an outlet plus a primary record we also checked.
• C: single source or interested party. We attribute it (“according to X”) and never present it as firmly established fact.

Grades follow our research record for the claim a link supports. A Wikipedia page is a summary source, so it never gets a grade above C. Where a page links one outlet but our record has a second outlet agreeing, the Sources list notes it. For a “nothing located” statement, the link is the place we looked, so you can look too. Our own tallies and readings are labeled as ours, and an opinion is labeled as an opinion.

News quotes on these pages stay under fifteen words. Quotes from government text can run longer, with the source shown.

Timing is not proof

A dated sequence is not a cause. When we pair a donation with a later government action, we provide the dates and the counter-explanation we located, and label it “timing, not proof.” We present favorable and adverse outcomes in the same format and at the same weight. A donation, a decision and a deal are three different things, and the episode makes only the claims we can back: donations are known, decisions are known and a deal is not established.

Corrections policy

We record every correction on the corrections page with its date, the original wording, the fix and the point where it was caught. We do not edit a page silently. Fixes made before the episode went live are included too, marked “caught before air.”

It’s satire built on reporting

The jokes are not claims. The “Miller & Sons” funeral home, the smartwatch and the fish on a therapist’s couch in the opening, the umbrella and the gazebo, the vending machine and the other gags are comic hypotheticals and metaphors, and each story page notes which lines are jokes. The facts underneath the jokes are what these pages source.

We checked the episode’s spoken factual claims against this research; the final voiced wording was checked on Oct. 4, 2026, after the voice track was generated.

What these pages are not

These pages are a draft for review and have not gone live. They set out what public records and news reporting display, with the limits noted, and they do not accuse anyone of a crime or of a purchased outcome. Where a company or person appears, the page repeats what the source holds and no more.