Your second paragraph stands alone on its own well without the first. I think human flaws spread around pretty evenly. It's actually a pretty good starting point for thinking humanizing the person you are disagreeing with and establishing common ground. If it's okay, I don't want to talk about the lab leak or laptop here - I don't want to distract from the separate topic of this law imposing 15 year prison sentences threat to Russian journalists.. "fake news" has only been brought into the discussion because of headline editorializing. I have to go back to work and likely cannot reply further but didn't want you to think I ignored you.

FWIW I despise censorship, irregardless of which party it comes from, and can tell we both see a lot of flaws in human nature in general so don't think we are far off in disagreement here. Journalists should be left the fuck alone, certainly.