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What is the Media? What has credibility?

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Easy Truth

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The media seems to be multiple sources of information. It seems to be any of these (and more):

1. Newspapers, News Shows on TV

2. Editors and Editorials

3. Pundits like Hannity, Tucker, Coulter, Michael Moore, Rachel Maddow etc.

4. Authors of Books

5. Think Tanks like ARI or Brookings or Hoover

6. Movies

7. Facebook Twitter Google (maybe parler now) 

8. The court system (evidence based and ideology)

etc.

There is a lot of talk about being manipulated by ... or manipulating the media and its consequences. There seems to be a push, an argument that all of the mentioned sources can be manipulated together.

Most likely they can't be manipulated completely, the truth seeps through one way or the other, unless there is a North Korean type dictatorship (and even then).

Credibility and authority go hand in hand.

This becomes very important if trust in governance goes to zero. At that point there would be chaos and ultimately violence.

  • Currently Trump is attacking the election results.  Many believe those stories. And yet the court system and most news organizations do not.
  • What if it were true that there was fraud in the election, so much so as to overturn actual votes? Could that in fact be successfully hidden from the public?
  • Are in fact conservative views suppressed by Twitter and News Organization? Or are their policies well thought out?

Did in fact Trump manipulate the media or was the media unfair to Trump? Did Biden control the media "better?" Or is this simply part of the skill set of any politician, meaning part of your required skills to communicate in a way that influences people (good or bad)? Or is all of this simply ad hominem anyway?

We cannot attack the media as a whole (assuming the media is a conflation of all sources mentioned above) . Some are truth tellers and some are not.  Credibility is partially earned based on track record and the rest is logic.

The only source that seems to have or should have the highest credibility is in fact the court system. Too bad it is so expensive to get the truth that way. Will the court system prove to be as unreliable as many of the other sources have become?

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  • 10 months later...

Easy Truth,

It is a law of economics, according to Rand and others,

that in the absence of a better and cheaper product,

some entrepreneur will be willing to step forward to offer something better and cheaper.

My advice, in judging whether a source is credible is:

1. Is the quality higher than its competitors?

2. Is it cheaper?

I bought a subscription to Wall Street Journal for $4 a month.

I've yet to find any problems with credibility, and the work is always high quality.


Ultimately it doesn't matter what media you read,

as long as your reason is clear and discerning. 

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