If I may suggest a way to train yourself up on this, I’d like to suggest an approach which I learned from the writer Francine Prose in one of her composition courses.
The method is simply this: for half a year, every week, go and find the same news story from three different publishers and read all three versions.
Do this solidly 25 times and you will begin to see the outlines of exactly the set of skills that you need to objectively classify information that’s found on the Internet. This is a simple and highly effective training technique that uses the mass variety of news sites on the Internet for an educational purpose. Once you begin to see and compare the narratives underlying most “news”, they will be impossible to un-see
>go and find the same news story from three different publishers and read all three versions.
The problem with this is, if the three publishers have been funded by the same pharmaceutical company, NGO, or intelligence agency, they are likely to produce nearly-identical stories on $PARTICULAR_ISSUE.
Alright, and what do you suggest? There seems to be some wild push to make people never believe anything and degrade the role of the press as things are in an authoritarian system. Very interesting derailments in this comment section about an article that speaks poorly of authoritarians such as Xi.
Well I think parent's comment is now obsolete. The new truth is going to be a blurry middle ground between establishment media, independent media (substack, Twitter-based disclosures), and public scientific disclosures.
The method is simply this: for half a year, every week, go and find the same news story from three different publishers and read all three versions.
Do this solidly 25 times and you will begin to see the outlines of exactly the set of skills that you need to objectively classify information that’s found on the Internet. This is a simple and highly effective training technique that uses the mass variety of news sites on the Internet for an educational purpose. Once you begin to see and compare the narratives underlying most “news”, they will be impossible to un-see