DearDon

Absolutely any state that would enjoy the benefits of the distractions that comes with an escalated political conflict, Israel, China, Saudi Arabia. Think about how quickly Erdogan switched from being US ally to being best chums with Russians and helping with the peace negotiations with Iran after the attempted coup. Was it Russia, was it US, what was the motive, does one have motive to frame the other?

It's not their job to do the convincing, they leave that to CNN, MSNBC or FOX. They just give some superficial material to get the ball rolling. There was next to no in depth articulation as to how this was definitely Russia. They're still twiddling their thumbs and saying 'we're confident' it was them.

Not to mention the number of dinosaurs still in each institution that can be simply told what to believe when it comes to technology.

I think you're pretty spot on with this. A handy thing to keep in mind when it comes to things like these is that we can only speculate. It happens too often that speculation and assumptions are presented as fact, or that someone retelling what another person says fails to use the same qualifying language and states something as fact.

I've personally come to speculate that there is some dodgy and disgusting acts occurring at this pizza joint. I'm not going to get dogmatic and explain why.

The media, through negligence or design, seems to almost always picks the weakest arguments and presents them as the best there is, if by design it's akin to strawmaning in my book. It works to drum up insane amounts of controversy and/or presents the opposing narratives case as weak. This is why we have 4chan and reddit with these rabid 'citizen journalists' that do all this investigation and forget how stupid it, and they, can be made to sound, it's also why we're going to get more of them, they can navigate through information that allows them to speculate (with good judgment in some cases IMO) that the MSM will just not cover.