There is zero reason to believe your personal network are better vetted than the New York Times and a lot of reason to suppose that they are probably a lot less accurate. The average person is a moron barely functional beyond the things they have been trained by rote to do. Even their professional betters are often very good at some tasks and worthless at others. Remember our erstwhile presidential candidate who simultaneously was a capable brain surgeon and honestly believed that the Pyramids were built by Joseph to store grain if you are tempted to believe anyone has a universal trustworthiness score rather than a degree of capability on a particular topic.

The average mainstream source is edited multiple times for clarity and correctness, passes through multiple sets of eyes, potentially seeks the opinion of subject matter experts, has the names of people involved which one could follow up with and statements from them. The average casual conversation or share on Facebook has none of these virtues and often a multitude of sins including but not limited to being mangled in transmission and having the ultimate and unknown trustworthiness score of the original primary source replaced with an emotional analysis of the person presently passing it on.

A story from a person whom you wouldn't trust to tell you the time is ultimately judged based on the high esteem you hold for the person who bandaged your knees and baked you cookies and then passed on to others based on their emotional esteem for you or even their legitimate analysis that you seem smart and successful.

Extrapolate and you will began to understand why a pretty sizable minority don't believe we landed on the moon, believe that vaccines cause autism, and or are out there looking for fucking Bigfoot.

The real reason people prefer their in group is that their in group consistently reinforces their preexisting beliefs which is comforting and safe. Unfortunately everyone's in group has a strong bias towards people whom are like self in terms of beliefs, geography, and wealth. In particular if your in group is successful in a wealthy country you are likely to be well insulated from misfortune and will probably receive the collective "everything is OK" social signal long after the society you are riding into the ground passes the point of no return.

If you would pull your head out of the sand and tune into something outside of your bubble you would note some signs of real trouble. I'm wondering as I write this if there were people out there actually watching the Iraqi misinformation minister who crowed about crushing the American military in the streets on Iraqi TV while in fact their nation toppled and their people died. I think you should have a look around.