My shit test for "is this article likely a bunch of FUD or just outright BS" is if they actually link to the source material. If they don't, I usually continue reading it but make a mental note that they're likely pushing some specific version of the event or facts in question.

It’s challenging to do this without being swayed— particularly if the writer is a good rhetorician. Listening to propaganda over and over again, even while knowing that it is propaganda, tends to influence your opinions. I don’t know what the solution to that is. But it does feel like reading the news requires a mental rigor that is both rare and exhausting.

Someone recommended that I supplement my news reading with newsprint from 20 years ago, just to get perspective on what matters and what doesn’t, and on how full of crap most of it is.

Yeah, no disagreement from me. It's the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect at scale.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...

Genuine question: were people ever reading the source material? Seems like a dubious claim that folks of yesteryear read deeply into original sources. Most people read headlines and attention grabbing quotes and this was just as true 100 years ago. I recently read about the Russian revolution and it was similar to today.

100 years ago an appreciable portion of people were reading from the western canon during their free time. Today, it's joe rogan. Just compare the first televised presidential debate versus the most recent one, and see just how far the bar has fallen in terms of the substance of public discourse from not even 100 years ago to today.

There's very little real reporting. Most of it is regurgitation of one source article for any given story. Very often that source article is fabricated for a purpose.

The Washington Post and New York Times articles cited suggest that there is even less reporting than some think.

"Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element — direct observation." The Machine Stops, page 18

Human centipede baby