I'm not usually very distrustful of mainstream news (at least, by internet standards) but I am very distrustful of the news' capacity to vet very technical issues correctly. Remember that Bloomberg "the Chinese put spy microchips on our motherboards" story?

I'm not accusing the WaPo of being distrustful here, I just think that in these cases the potential for manipulation, half-truths and technical mistakes from their sources is very high, and without either knowing who these sources are or what are the concrete element they're using to make their conclusions I find it very hard to blindly trust these sources.

I have the exact same attitude. Reading WaPo, Bloomberg, and even NYT (though I think NYT has a slight edge here) report on technical issues make me cringe. You can tell they're trying to hardest to understand and to explain it in a comprehensible way but it's just so bad. Then I think to myself, if that's the way it is for computing, what about other technical/STEM/specialized fields? I trust them for their reporting on those but what if they have missing the important nuances there too?

> "I'm just wondering why this response has become so popular recently."

There is a huge divergence in understanding of the purport of recent events, starting with the Wikileaks release of DNC emails in 2016, and continuing through to Hunter Biden's laptop

One camp believes or suspects that Russia is more of a useful bugbear and scapegoat for certain political factions in the US, used cynically as FUD to manipulate public perceptions, than something to be so worried about

The other believes in good faith that Russia is a dangerous and sophisticated adversary with assets in the highest levels of the US government, and finds the first camp to be incomprehensibly obtuse at best

It's difficult for these 2 camps to communicate effectively for some reason

Lack of trust.

> I'm just wondering why this response has become so popular recently.

Nihilistic cynicism sounds a lot like smartitude to stupid people.