[Lanny_McDonald]

Originally Posted by Winsor_Pilates

There's no longer unbiased news, every platform is playing to a side unfortunately and the audiences are asking for that now too. It's a chicken or the egg situation on whether the platforms starting duping audiences or audiences wanted slanted news, but it's where we are now. They feed each other.

Which is exactly why I framed the answer to the question the way I did. Focus on those that dedicate themselves to complying with journalistic integrity and practices, that do their best to provide balance and validate their information through multiple sources. News is fact-based and not opinion based. Too many people conflate the two and think opinion is factual and news. It is NOT. It is why I referenced who I did and made sure to point toward Columbia Journalism Review as a starting point. They have documented and maintain the gold standard for journalistic practices/behaviors for decades.

I try to read both sides with a grain of salt and the truth is somewhere in the middle.

Fantastic advice, but you're making a false equivalency here, suggesting that both sides provide the same level of fact-finding and verification. You also fail to mention that many sources in the RW mediasphere do not have investigative or research organs of their own and instead rely of repacking the work of others or applying commentary to work done by others. Media literacy plays a big role in "finding a balance between the two".

What you're seeing demonstrated in this thread is many people will only read from sources they already know agree with them and will say exactly what they want to hear.

We do see that a lot, especially stuff that comes from social media. Anytime you are consuming information through a "feed" you are leaving yourself open to manipulation through the algorithm. The "feed" is packaged to your preselected likes and wants. To get out of this trap, stop relying on "feeds" and go find the reporting yourself, from multiple trusted sources. Taking information from a "social media feed" is the ultimate in intellectual laziness and exactly why our society is dumbing down to disturbing levels.

Shooting the messenger is a defence mechanism to avoid facing information you can't refute and don't want to tackle or dare consider to have some validity.

Shooting the messenger can also be just calling out bull#### when its posted. If you're posting information from a source that just weeks ago you would have jumped all over as being a disinformation agent, then you've fallen into a confirmation bias trap. Worthy of being called out IMO.

That way, they never have to challenge anything they think, and quite frankly don't have to think at all. Everything they post is a playbook written by someone else anyway.

Did you get that from your social media feed?