Hi Lindsay, actually their is a gap in the argument that you made:
We should not confuse the messanger with the message. A person with a bad reputation can tell the truth and viceversa.
Always take information given from someone else with a grain of salt...no matter where you get the information (even if they claim that they did "research"). Especially on the internet where alot of the "research" is just collecting opinions from others.
This is especially true when we hear something that validates our own world view (that's when our critical thinking ability disapears)
So what you are saying, is that everything is fake news? Unless you were there yourself?
Not exactly. I am just saying that we shouldn't come to the conclusion that something is untrue just because it was reported by certain news outlets that have comercial interests behind them.
99% of the time the media reports actual events but the distortion comes when they start to qualify the news.
For instance where I come from the media would report about rallies and protests but would focus on the inconvenience that they would cause by slowing down traffic. Both were true but they would downplay what triggerd the protests in the first place.
Sometimes people with good intentions make up stuff or choose to ignore things for political reasons (after all "It's for a good cause").
The real test comes when two different sources report very different accounts for certain events. That is when you know that someone is lying or being inaccurate on purpose.
The bottom line is that we should not ignore what the regular media publishes or accept as a fact that the non-mainstream media always tell the complete stories. We just need to follow the sources.