Subject: Re: Ain't That The Truth
Facts are facts, as in your example of the NBA score.
2+2 =4 no matter if the New York Times writes an editorial on it or Greg Gutfeld makes a joke about it on Fox News.

True - but 2+2=4 isn't the reporting of an event. It's a mathematical statement. The truth of the assertion is completely assessable wholly without regard to the identity of the person reporting it.

By contrast, however, if someone asserts "I just saw Albaby punch a kitten," that is not necessarily an assertion which can be assessed independently of the person asserting it. There may or may not be corroborating witnesses or evidence. The likelihood of the truth may be contingent on the credibility of the person asserting it.

This. This is why it's crucial to not out of hand reject a particular source *until* an evaluation of the factual merits of their information takes place.

No, it's not. You absolutely should reject certain sources.

Consider the following, more abstract example. We have a circumstance where either A is true, or B is true. They are mutually exclusive. Imagine we have a political spectrum where people on the "up" side of the spectrum generally want A to be true, and people on the "down" side of the spectrum want B to be true (rather than left or right). Now imagine four different types of news sources:

- The platonic ideal news source, where the financial and reputational incentives for everyone at the news source depend up on them figuring out the A v. B debate correctly. Whether they report A or B to be true will depend entirely on the results of their best efforts at investigating and reporting.

- The Up-leaning news source, which caters only to an audience of "up" viewers. All of their financial and reputational incentives are based on whether their audience hears something it wants to hear. They will report A to be true, no matter what - their investigating and reporting efforts will be entirely oriented towards reaching that result.

- The Down-leaning news source, which caters to the "down" viewers. They're the converse of the Up-leaning source - all their incentives are to return a story that says B is true, no matter what. So that's what they will report.

- The Social media news source, which is run by algorithm. They will "report" - ie. promulgate to the widest audience - either A or B not based on which one is true, but based entirely on which one generates more engagement. That basically means they will tell their audience that either A or B is true based upon which one makes the audience madder.

These are caricatures, of course. But note that you should reject the second and third sources out of hand. That doesn't mean those two news sources are wrong. In fact, one of them has to be right. But their reporting doesn't give you any information about the issue. Whether the second and third sources claim that A or B is true has absolutely no bearing on whether A or B is likely to be true or not, because those sources aren't designed to investigate or interrogate A vs. B claims - just to support the previously decided-upon outcome. You should, instead, try to find news sources that come closest to the first type.

This isn't the logical "genetic fallacy." Just because the up-leaning news source reports A to be true doesn't mean that A is false. Just that it gives you absolutely no information about whether A is true or not.