> he shouldn't be so willing to accept as correct articles in areas outside of his expertise

Let me refocus that to highlight the silliness:

> If doctors get it wrong in areas you know about then why should one think they get it right in areas you don't know about?

If my doctor knows not even the slightest tiniest thing about computers, the internet, etc., I'm still going to trust him on medicinal matters.

Reporters are not experts in the areas they report on. If reporters generally get it wrong on the areas that I know about then why would I assume they get right on the other areas they write about?

If your doctor wrote articles about computers and got it wrong would you be willing to trust him/her on articles about Syria? Tax policy? Politics? You would trust your doctor in the area of his/her expertise and not necessarily about other areas.

> Reporters are not experts in the areas they report on.

Some are. Some aren't. But if you're not an expert in the same area, how can you judge?

(eg. "MD" in Private Eye is a doctor and therefore reasonably qualified to report on medical things.)

Because it's lazy to just assume newspapers are always wrong about everything. If we don't assume newspapers are always wrong about everything, we can assume they are sometimes wrong about some things and sometimes right about other things. That makes reading the news a fact finding mission. Discerning the truth from fiction is just part of life.

The point isn’t that one should assume they are always wrong it is that one shouldn’t assume they are always right.

You started this thread with a claim of "I don't think any of the popular sources of information are trustworthy." That seems to be a position of default assuming they are wrong.

Saying that something is not trustworthy is literally saying it is not something that is able to be relied upon to be truthful. This means one should not assume the source is correct. It certainly doesn't mean to assume it is wrong.

Because topic areas are in no way equivalent. My expertise is specific and not of broad public interest. But tax policy, for example, absolutely is of public interest. And news organisations have been covering for years. Individual journalists have been covering it for years and are as much experts as anyone out there.

Let’s take Syria for example. Do you think the reporters reporting on Syria and the complexity of what is going on there are experts in foreign policy? I don’t. I don’t think government affairs reporters are experts on tax policy either. I think they interview people and create a narrative and write said narrative. They are not usually experts on what they write about. They are writers crafting a story for an audience. I generally think they try their best but they get it wrong due to pressures of the job and limited time/ability to vet things. Especially these days with dwindling budgets for news organizations.