No. of Recommendations: 10
Facts are facts, and stand on their own merits.
Complaining about sources is logically fallacious, and you know that.
Thinking about this for a bit, I don't think that's correct. Complaining about sources isn't fallacious.
We live in a pretty fragmented world. There's countless different news outlets. There's countless different sources for those news outlets to draw from.
For some types of facts, that doesn't matter. If you're asking, "Who won the Heat-Celtics game last night," every news outlet will have the same answer. Because every source will have the same facts.
For other types of questions, though, the facts you get from news outlets will depend on which news outlets you choose. Because different news outlets will go to different sources, and if there's a divergence of position among potential news sources you can get divergent reporting of facts. So if you're asking, "Is surgical intervention harmful or beneficial to 17-year-olds who identify as transgender," the facts you get will depend entirely on which news outlets you go to. Because that's a contested question where you can find credentialed sources that will answer "harmful," and where you can find credentialed sources that will answer "beneficial" - so the facts that get reported to you are a function of which news outlet you pick. Because news reporting has become such a diverse market, there are outlets - or groups of outlets - that are entirely oriented towards delivering facts from news sources that are sorted by the preferences of their target audience.
In this world, your choice of news outlets will largely determine which facts you get presented with. Which means that the quality of the news you get presented with - the degree to which that news will give you an accurate understanding of the issue at hand - depends entirely on whether you choose news outlets that are genuinely making an effort to draw from sources that will provide an accurate understanding of the issue.
So if you're looking at an issue that sources are divided on - let's say whether the Paleo diet "works" or not - you can find news sources that will tell you absolutely "yes," and news sources that will tell you absolutely "no." But since the "right" answer is almost certainly, "we don't really know for sure, and doctors and nutritionists disagree about the issue," the news outlet that bothers to really investigate and interrogate the issue by looking at lots of different sources and properly assess their credibility is going to get you closer to the true facts.
Albaby
