Kurieuo wrote: ↑Sun Aug 09, 2020 11:21 pmSeems to me today there is your "news" and their "news". Who's news is really news? How do
you decide?
Sometimes it
seems that way, but that's not reality. In reality the facts are the facts, period. I do my best to get to the facts by cross checking multiple sources. I'm more inclined to take a source seriously if they've been reliably honest in the past. I also make use of fact checking sites, since they all cite their sources, and of the Internet, which allows me to research claims about past events. I also read past headlines and titles, since those are so frequently misleading clickbait. And finally, I've trained myself to be extremely skeptical of anything shocking, since shocking claims are usually false.
I trust sources like the New York times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, NPR, Propublica, the Times of London, the Guardian, the AP, and Reuters, to name a few, because they report facts and issue corrections when they get it wrong. Most of the criticism I see of those sources comes from people holding up an editorial, opinion, or analysis piece and screaming about bias. That's silly - editorials, opinions, and analysis are up front about the fact that they're biased and they have no bearing on the news content. Even Fox News and MSNBC do pretty well on actual news (during the day), even though they fill the prime time hours with punditry and propaganda.
I don't trust right wing blogs because for the last 6 years or so I've been reading examples of their work posted here and then fact checking them, and I've found their record to be abysmal. I don't trust the President, because he lies literally all the time, and they're usually really obvious. Most other politicians get the benefit of the doubt, but none get full-on trust.
So I pretty much just start with the knowledge that there are no "alternative facts" and move forward using critical thinking skills to figure out who's lying. It's generally pretty easy.