Random independent coverage from bloggers, e.g. Popehat, tends to be much better informed than people rushing to incite us on a deadline. This goes double for anything the least bit technical, like law.

Sadly, there just aren't enough sources like that to actually dig into most stories.

Facebook and Twitter would be ghost towns without this disconnect.

The trick, which people seem to be generally bad at, is:

a) limiting the scope of authority you attribute to someone

b) not immediately discounting contradictory evidence but using it to judge whether you need to pry deeper yourself or to discount some of that authority you've vested in them

c) actually remembering how authoritative the source was when repeating the information or using it as the basis for other assumptions

d) actually looking into issues deeper that you decide to care about and find the truth, not just was some semi-authoritative mouth piece repeated to you

For example, I try to make a habit of prefixing or postfixing statements in conversation with disclaimers ("At least that's what I heard or seem to remember reading, but I'm not sure how that I'm not sure how true it is.") if I'm not fairly certain of the information.

Examine their voting record, lobby donations, and primary information and action. Decide from there.

Without that, we get the barely binary system that we have. The MSM can be lazy and non-journalistic because no one bothers to notice. No one cares.

Granted, there are definitely things that aren't amenable to this, but it's not exactly hopeless, either.

The umbrage taken by the mainstream media in the last year being called "fake news" is a bit amusing. I've often wondered what percentage of it all (and what we know of history) is complete nonsense.

So... likely quite a lot. I trust verifiable sources a lot more than I trust any outlet, even the supposedly reputable ones. I mean, just how long did it take for Jayson Blair to get caught fabricating stories in the NYT? [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayson_Blair

What am I missing?

And a more facile analysis obscures the fact that there is yet a bit of fact-based reporting getting lost in the noise. Authors who normally link to actual primary sources and do real analysis instead of only cheap opinion, albeit sometimes imperfectly. So more Glenn Grenwald, Popehat or Groklaw and less Fox/Buzzfeed/CNN.

There are real problems here, but political partisans tend to make more fake news instead of doing anything useful to solve it.

But even that is wrong.

Firstly fake news is exactly that - actually fabricated websites designed to look like “the Sacramento beast” or what have you, filled with content that will sound legitimate to an American conservative and trick them into clicking on ads.

That’s fake news and it’s actually not even news, it’s more like surprise literature/acting to con people.

Trump on the other hand argues for example that he has the biggest crowds, when he doesn’t by every device that recorded images of the subject.

Fake news is in this case is just a term that relies on the audience to impute meaning to it.

There is grass on the National Mall. During the Obama inauguration, people walked on it as you would expect. The damage cost several $million to fix. In photos of the Trump inauguration crowd, notice that the sparsely-occupied area is white. It was covered in translucent boxes to protect the grass. (the boxes were borrowed from stadiums that use them for events like concerts) The boxes can be walked on, but people would hesitate. They are not inviting like grass. This kept many people out of the photos.

Another issue is that the central area of the photo was blocked off into different security sectors. Due to violence, entry was often blocked. Many people showed up for the inauguration but were unable to get to where they could see it, which would be the empty areas of the photos.

In the usual pair of photos, the Trump photo is cropped relative to the Obama photo. The physical area seems to differ by roughly a factor of two.

There is also the question of time when the photos were taken.

The physical area is virtually the same. They merely appear to be taken from slightly different vantage points. Both show the area where you might reasonably expect people to observe from. They are taken at the same time of day differing by a matter of 5-20 minutes.

You aren't even nitpicking your statement about the area differing by a factor of 2 is a clear lie designed to sow doubt. Please don't bring your alternative facts here.

Those are not the usual pair of photos.

Almost like people believe the same thing said very much the same way but from a completely different source. Thanks, I'm here all weekend. ;)

> FAKE NEWS - A TOTAL POLITICAL WITCH HUNT!

He doesn't use the intellectual tone when he talks about it.

> Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows.

For a certain type of person -- the type that reads HN -- this scholarly style is what we expect. It lays out the biases and beliefs we hold in a manner we expect. It backs it up with some seemingly solid logic that we can relate to. We've all seen at least one badly written scientific article where we know the facts better. So we take it as fact and agree with it.

Is there any difference between them? Of course not, they're saying the same thing, but in a different linguistic style. It does take a bit of work to recognize that as most people have fairly deep biases towards linguistic style that are difficult to suppress. As an exercise to prove this to yourself, try sum up the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect in a way that would appeal to a non-academic.

Here's the interesting part: Trump picked up this linguistic style only in the last few years. While we don't like it, his voter base probably wouldn't have voted for him if he started his sentences "briefly stated". Know your audience, often the presentation of your argument is far more important than the argument itself.