Subject: Re: Ain't That The Truth
And you're bringing in jury trials and testimony into a debate about news reporting on an internet message board.

It's the same principles. To take an extreme example, if Reuters or the Wall Street Journal report that the Kremlin is considering pulling troops out of Bahkmut, you might consider that news to be credible based on the source of the reporting; if the newspaper from your local high school reported that news, you'd probably ignore it. That's because Reuters and the WSJ are known to you to have the resources to possibly have that information, have a lot of incentives to get it right, and will probably engage in the type of fact-checking and interrogation of that report to reduce the likelihood that it is incorrect. Your local high school paper will not.

I'll further extend this and say that it's not up to a few posters on said message board to pre-determine where all sources of information are allowed to be pulled.

They're not doing that. They're telling you that they regard certain sources of information to be no more credible than the local high school newspaper in my example in the previous paragraph. Because those sources have an established track record of not engaging in the sort of rigorous interrogation of claims that is required to be a credible news source. Because of the business model of those sources - providing content to an ideologically homogenous customer base - they are unlikely to have any incentive, and thus unlikely to invest any resources, into determining whether something that the have a source for is true rather than whether it supports the views of their customers. Again, to the contrary - if they've got someone willing to say something their audience wants to hear, it's better for them not to try to figure out whether that person is right (by, say, engaging in the hard work of talking to further sources that might push back on the original source). They gain more by producing content that slants the "correct" way for their audience than by testing those assertions with real investigation.

They're refusing to engage in actual debate and are just running away.

Generally speaking, if one wants to assert a point in an actual debate, it's up to that person to back it up with some evidence that it's true. There are lots of content-generating sites that don't engage in the type of actual investigation and interrogation of claims to be credible sources. No one outside of their target audience is going to regard their "news" as being backed up by anything to suggest taking it seriously, and even their target audience probably shouldn't either.

To use a fanciful extreme example again, if someone asserted that their Magic 8 Ball had confirmed that Donald Trump was guilty of selling military secrets to Sri Lanka, you would dismiss that by pointing out (correctly) that the source of that information was so deficient that it wasn't worth arguing about. That's not you "running away" from Sri Lanka-Gate - it's you astutely noting that your interlocutors hadn't even passed the starting post.