[BoiledCabbage]

> I'm the complete opposite. I've gone from being a subscriber to the economist, nytimes, npr, etc and accepting them as gospel to seeing them for agenda pushing institutions.

You haven't said what you've replaced these news sources with.

I my eyes, a big part of problem is people letting perfect be the enemy of good. People conclude the nytimes or economist or any news source has some inherent bias in it. Those biases are smaller than most info sourced, but definitely but present. They then replace that news source with a non-factual (or significantly less factual) information source that more closely matches their biases.

Saying "I stopped reading the xyz mainstream paper and replaced it with my Facebook feed" is not a net win. Nor is replacing it with some guys blog online, nor an opinion show that includes factoids. But as little as people admit it, this is most of what I see happening.

The other answer I often hear is "I now take in a ton of different sources and make up my own mind." Which is a great philosophy as people should always be making up their own mind. But again, when usually pressing someone on the sources they take in, the majority are low-factual sources. That's not improving anything.

It's like a person having the same few meals every day. Their Dr says they should get more variety in their diet, so they add 30 different types of junk food. Yes it's technically more variety, but it's absolutely not an improvement.