It is a fact of our lives here in the USA that we all, right or left, have to be more careful about our news sources if we care about truth and reality. There are a variety of reasons why this has become critical but a few of them are:
1. Deliberate manipulation on the part of the right has destroyed the few mechanisms in place to keep the press honest.
2. Important elements of the press are deliberately and explicitly dishonest (Fox News, the WSJ, etc).
3. The internet makes it very easy to create false news and spread it. It may be impossible to remove deliberate errors.
4. Foreign actors and their intelligence services are manipulating the news to their advantage.
5. Various political leaders, particularly on the right, are colluding with these foreign actors for their own political purposes.
But whether you agree with this or not, and no matter where you stand on the political divide, if you want to know what is going on and perhaps set some limits on any discussion, there are some straightforward if sometimes annoying things you can do.
Here is one suggested list.
1. When you are making an argument about something, try to keep a particular source for your point at your fingertips. This source should be as much as possible a credible and undeniable point that can be verified. For example, whether or not you agree or disagree with Trump's immigration policy, the NPR reported
The ruling by a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected a Trump administration challenge of a lower court decision finding that the government failed to offer detained minors safe and sanitary conditions as required by the 1997 Flores settlement.
In 2017, U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee found that the government was violating that settlement by not providing safe and sanitary conditions when it held minors in conditions that deprived them of sleep — cold and over-crowded cells – and denied them access to food, water and basic hygiene.
https://www.npr.org/2019/08/15/751634918/appeals-court-rules-detained-migrant-children-should-get-soap-sleep-clean-water
At this point, its not too relevant whether this is their (the Trump Administration's) policy. What we are discussing is what a court ruled.
2. Beyond keeping objective sources at your disposal, you can check yourself if that is what the 9th US Circuit Court ruled. You can do so by looking up their ruling online, or by using one of the fact checking services (more of these below).
3. If you feel that you do not have the skill or resources to check whether a story is true, you can use one of the two fact checking services. These two services are politifact.com and snopes.com. Use them.
4. If something remarkable has been printed, or is circulating on the Internet, you should be able to get corroboration from another source. If it is only on rawstory.com or breitbart.com, and none of the other major services are carrying it, then wait a bit before you assume its true.
5. If you read something that is too good to be true (or the reverse), then be sure to check the sources even harder. Likely it is too good to be true.
6. It is no longer enough to report something you heard that you believe is true, you have to have a source for it, a specific reference somewhere, that you can point to and can be refuted or confirmed.
7. Finally, it is not enough to point to a single piece of data without taking into account history and context.
This is just the start of what we have to do. If someone is trying to make an argument and they dont have a source, and they dont understand the context, then you should tell them that you dont believe them as it is currently stated. They wont like that but that doesnt matter anymore.
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