Yes, sources should be protected. But there should be mechanisms in place to protect sources who identify themselves that do not require the gullible public to just believe what they were told, because an authority said it was okay to believe something an anonymous person said about something.
Maybe this is something that the crypto/cert folks should address - a means of verifying that a source has been properly and adequately identified, without revealing the details required to target that individual for harassment/assassination/etc.
A media clearing house for sources, or a blockchain ...
And therefore, a perfectly good example for why people should demand sources be revealed when it comes to issues of state election security.
Otherwise, we will continue to be ruled by duplicitous subterfuge instead of verifiable facts.
However, if you want to know about the effects of NAFTA, or US policy on Venezuela and how useful it is, or Russian involvement in the US elections, or trickle-down economics, or the benefits of a stimulus package etc, then the NYT, the Economist, and Breitbart are about as likely to give you a trust-worthy picture. So where can you look to, as an average citizen without time to conduct your own research on each topic you potentially care about? I don't think there is any good answer.
Society absolutely needs a new independent, small-scale, un-elitist media. "Factory journals" and such - small organizations that are not owned by any powers that be, where a few people can spend the time to digest other sources and try to come up with a more accurate picture. Not multi-million dollar ad-based industrial media (NYT), and not activist propagandist media (Breitbart) - that is always going to be far too heavily biased to have any hope of being a trust-worthy source of information on most topics that they can feasibly ignore.
And in case you don't believe me that most US media is a horrible source of information on the outside world, please find one single article on the biggest worker's strike in world history, that happened in January of this year in India.
Edit: to be clear: I'm not in any way claiming that Breitbart is a credible news organization to any extent similar to the NYT or Economist. Breitbart are a disgusting organization whose aim is misinformation, and lying comes naturally to them; the NYT and Economist and others like them do have journalistic practices and actually care about the truth, and are excellent sources for some kinds of news - they just have massive biases in certain other areas, especially on foreign and economic policy, where they are not trustworthy, but even then I wouldn't expect outright lies.
But I think a small, un-elite media is exactly where the problem is right now. All these blogs and YouTube channels that wants to spread the truth, then discover you can make money pushing conspiracy, have actually been crowding out actual journalistic organizations that have actual reporters.
To me, they are the spiritual successors of the small journals which would have great original reporting on local labor or environmental issues and would also casually report on medical myths and other pet causes of the authors.
I'm not sure what the answer is though and I think you're making some great points here.
> To me, they are the spiritual successors of the small journals which would have great original reporting on local labor or environmental issues and would also casually report on medical myths and other pet causes of the authors.
These are very good points, that I'll have to think about more.
It's not so much that the main stream media outlets lie about facts. They misrepresent them because they have a bias and a specific opinion on matters that it's so obvious to anyone that isn't on the left. Which is why people flock to other sources such as Breitbart, which at the very least, spins and interprets the events/info with a right-leaning worldview.
The overarching problem is that journalism has become a forum of opinion rather than facts + helping readers understand complex topics by digesting it for them. And it's no wonder we're becoming polarized, because we pick the "opinion" we like, rather than being given the facts and going with it, regardless from which source we get it.
I stand by my characterization of Breitbart though - they absolutely knowingly lie about facts. I would also add that you know that your political view is extreme far right when you start calling The Economist "left-leaning".
And I don't think that journalism, especially in the mainstream, has ever been more than an opinion & public relations (propaganda) piece. News organizations are usually owned by rich owners and financed by rich corporations through ads, and so can't stray too far from the mainstream capitalist right-wing/centrist view on most issues of consequence for their sponsors. It happens that lately, corporate America and the rich have generally become much more open on social issues, so you see that reflected in the press.
But you'll be hard pressed to find a mainstream journal or news organization that shares the left's more extreme beliefs on economic issues (e.g. pro unionization, shorter work week), and extremely hard pressed to find any news organization that is against armed support for Israel, that is against the coup attempt in Venezuela, that is against US support for Saudi Arabia, that is for US nuclear disarmament, that is against escalation of the conflict with Russia etc.
Note: if you want to see left-leaning media, look at The Jacobin for example - you'll probably be shocked at how vastly they differ from the NYT. Here is an example: https://jacobinmag.com/2015/05/the-new-york-times-goes-to-wa...
I can agree, once I did my own research and found them misrepresenting facts; during the refugee crisis, a Breitbart headline said something along the lines of "x hundred thousand crimes committed by refugees in Germany". I looked at the source/googled the number and found the source government press release, it was the number of people entering the country without permit, of course that's against the (German) law, but a refugee has to per default do this to enter somewhere and claim refugee status (unless they're the kind of refugee that could get plane tickets to a destination country willing to issue them entry visas -- but surely no EU embassy thought "Ah here are some Syrians wanting to visit as tourists for a week, give them visas.").
Obviously the Breitbart article didn't mention this detail, leaving the details of the "crimes" committed to the imagination of their readers...
What makes you believe this? I can't think of a time in history when the average person could critically evaluate information successfully.
The best you can do is cross-reference everything you know, take into account the degree to which you can verify each thing independently, and try and come up with some correlations between different sources to establish a web of credibility.
Unfortunately, experience has shown that regular humans just don't do this.
This is partly because american NGOs have orchestrated a huge indoctrination effort among journalists on a global scale. I have worked for national media for a little under a decade and every place I worked, there was journalists participating in stuff from "open societies foundation".
The quality of journalism has reached such a low that when tourists are group raped for hours and then are finally decapitated by religious fanatics (Any other description would not be allowed in media anymore, but you know who) who film and put it on the internet. they use terms like "Found with injuries on their neck". And then our police and media do everything they can to stop the real horrific truth from surfacing. No wonder people stop believing a word and become overly skeptical.
Honestly I think its a sign of health that people become skeptical regarding mass media. It would be even healthier if the general populace started to dismantle the power structures that dictates our dystopian future.
Edit: surely I'm not the only one who remembers how the NYT almost singlehandedly started a war based on false reporting?
David Frum, Bill Kristol, Nicole Wallace, and General Michael Hayden are now MSNBC and #resist heroes. James Clapper and John Brennan are on CNN payroll as talking heads. At least the orange guy and his particular complicit press never passed a Patriot Act, didn't start any warrantless kidnapping/detainment/torture/execution programs, or mass surveillance programs against their own people, and didn't start any wars. More than I can say for NYT, CNN, et al.
The "official" outlets are populated by former CIA/NSA/FBI, and similar people with a documented history of lying (even to Congress) to protect abuses of constitutional and even human rights. In that context it's very hard to trust ANY information source, especially algorithmically. I don't know how to write a program that recognizes these people who were liars yesterday are now the good guys.
So yes, please keep remembering and remind people. Large parts of the current problem rest on a bed of forgetfulness.
The various members of the public may have different opinions on the trustworthiness of the witness which means that the government can just make sure that whatever action they are taking is to the benefit of one of these groups and surf on their approval.
Saddam Hussein did have a "weapon of mass destruction", poison gas, and used it on Kurds. You can find photos of bodies with white foam from their mouths from that time.
He did not have much, if any, nuclear technology, despite the "aluminum tubes" news clips which led to the concern over weapons of mass destruction. (There are specialized alloys used in nuclear processing, but not aluminum.)
Aside from that, the main information source was an exiled Iraqi politician that the administration said was credible to construct their narrative.
So Saddam Hussein went from a US ally, to a war criminal.
One major US newspaper tried to push back, but the rest, including the NYT, just repeated everything the White House said.
With their recent breaking story of Donald Trump $750 tax, I've been reading through their published article, but have not found any solid evidence for this proposed figure, only just a bunch of links to their previous articles in past years. If anyone can find some actual evidence for the $750 tax bill from the NYT report, I would very much like to see it https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/29/us/trump-750-taxes.html
The world had 50+ years to learn this about the TV, but didn't. Don't hold your breath.
We as a species and our societies by proxy are self actualizing kicking and screaming.
I don't mean that the latter is not necessarily a problem or not, but we definitely should not be mixing up our thoughts and impression of one with the other, they are very very different in nature.