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The week's question
In December 2024, in the thread "Re: BRK: Why Not XOM?", BreckHutHigh asked the members: "What about the long road trips with kids?" This week it is put to everyone again. The button below opens the small thread re-asking it - read what others have said so far, then give your own answer as an ordinary reply.
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Author: Dope1   😊 😞
Number: of 84357 
Subject: Re: Ain't That The Truth
Date: 05/19/23 5:04 PM
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Thinking about this for a bit, I don't think that's correct. Complaining about sources isn't fallacious.

Facts are facts, as in your example of the NBA score.
2+2 =4 no matter if the New York Times writes an editorial on it or Greg Gutfeld makes a joke about it on Fox News.

So if you're asking, "Is surgical intervention harmful or beneficial to 17-year-olds who identify as transgender," the facts you get will depend entirely on which news outlets you go to.

Ahhh. This is where nuance comes in.
Was the 17 year old suicidal prior to transitioning and did the surgery + transitioning prevent a potential loss of life?
Or was the 13 year old pushed into transitioning from overbearing parents or teachers and regrets the permanent alteration of their body some 10 years later?

Because news reporting has become such a diverse market, there are outlets - or groups of outlets - that are entirely oriented towards delivering facts from news sources that are sorted by the preferences of their target audience.

And this is both a good and a bad thing as people will gravitate towards their preferred choices. The folks on here who do the most complaining about sources find left wing news outlets more palatable and therefore assign them more credibility than say, Newsmax or OAN...even if OAN is reporting that the Red Sox beat the Yankees.

So if you're looking at an issue that sources are divided on - let's say whether the Paleo diet "works" or not - you can find news sources that will tell you absolutely "yes," and news sources that will tell you absolutely "no." But since the "right" answer is almost certainly, "we don't really know for sure, and doctors and nutritionists disagree about the issue," the news outlet that bothers to really investigate and interrogate the issue by looking at lots of different sources and properly assess their credibility is going to get you closer to the true facts.


This. This is why it's crucial to not out of hand reject a particular source *until* an evaluation of the factual merits of their information takes place.
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This community has written 84,309 posts about US Policy. The article-length ones it recommended most:
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