I trust CNN about as much as a fart during flu season.

I have found this YouTube channel be extremely informative instead: https://www.youtube.com/c/S2Underground/videos

Why do you trust the YouTube channel more than CNN? What has it done to earn your trust?

Would you trust it more than Fox News? Than Reuters or the AP? How come?

It makes little sense to be intensely skeptical of the quality of news from a large news corporation, even a biased one, and to then uncritically accept the quality of news from a smaller, more anonymous organization.

A Google search for the channel that you linked gives me absolutely nothing that signals to me they are trustworthy, and quite a bit that suggests they are not. How did you find them?

What has CNN done to earn your trust?

This should be good.

I don't think I said I trusted CNN. I asked the parent commenter why they trusted this other source more.

CNN being trustworthy or not doesn't make some random YouTube channel a better source. I'd like to understand how the parent commenter came to recommend this alternative.

I follow your logic, but are you sympathetic to the notion that an individual might judge an unknown entity with seemingly good content (my personal example: not infantilizing the viewer) may be more trustworthy than a demonstrably untrustworthy entity like CNN.

If your response was to the suggestion to trust this YouTuber it would make sense to me, but this is a rote comparison between a bad actor and an unknown actor. If I believe that CNN is a bad actor, I’ll trust relatively-unknown-but-compelling-content-YouTuber over CNN.

Surely the right answer then is to trust neither? Why would you trust anyone except a known-good actor?

Of course, this assumes a model where one completely trusts or doesn't trust. In reality, you can read CNN (or Fox, or MSNBC, or whatever) and learn a lot of things that are true - you just have to figure out how to wash the layers of spin off them to surface the bits that really matter.

For example, I might trust that the news (not opinion) sides of CNN or Fox won't knowingly run stories that are actually false/made up, but I wouldn't trust any speculation or conclusions they draw, or that the set of facts they have given me are the most important or salient ones. This Youtube channel, on the other hand, is a completely unknown factor - I can't know what to trust about them, if anything, and it would be a big investment to figure that out.

Put another way: If CNN, Fox, the NYT, the WSJ, and AP/Reuters are all reporting something, how likely is it to be true? If only one of those entities gives me certain information about that story, how likely is that info to be true? And so on.

CNN and Faux news are both as reliable as the Daily Show for accurate news. All three are comedies.

Question: Did you even watch any of the videos before deciding your opinion?

I don't think I need to watch any videos from that channel in order to have the opinion "videos from anonymous YouTube channels are unlikely to be high quality news sources."

Even if I did watch their videos, what would that tell me? In what context should I judge them? Do they cite sources other than their anonymous presenter's own knowledge? Do I have sufficient knowledge to evaluate the sources they give me, if they give me any?

You haven't really answered my question: What has this entity done to earn your trust?

You're embarrassing yourself. It's a presentation of OSINT data.

I would suggest having an informed opinion over a loud one.

Since we're doing personal attacks now, I'm gonna disengage, but "a presentation of OSINT data" is meaningless if the data involved can't be independently vetted or cited.

This is my last comment responding to you; for the record, you have still answered none of my questions.

They literally have links to everything being presented.... that's what makes it Open Source. You're more than welcome to verify all the facts independently, as many already are. That level of transparency is not possible with CNN.

ROFL. So true.