[jerf]

"I find it pretty easy to find reputable news sources,"

Were your "reputable news sources" promising you up, down, left, right, backwards and forwards that the Mueller report was going to end Trump and conclusively prove that his Presidency was the result of Russian collusion?

Maybe not for you as an individual. Mine were a great deal more mixed, for instance. But I suspect for a lot of people, the reason they find it easy to find "reputable news sources" is that they never hold their news sources to account for being wrong.

I use this example merely as the most temporally-handy example of when a lot of "reputable sources" got it very, very wrong. There are many.

[josefresco]

> Were your "reputable news sources" promising you

No? News shouldn't "promise you" anything. Maybe you're reading too many opinion pieces? 50-75% of the news I see shared online seems to be opinion pieces attempting to "synthesize" the current news of the day. If you focus on journalists (including following them directly), and just pure news you won't be promised anything.

[jerf]

"just pure news you won't be promised anything."

One of the most important aspects of the scientific mindset is to attempt to disprove one's own beliefs... I'd argue that that alone is enough to derive the most important aspects of scientific practice from.

Your challenge for the next couple of months is to read your own sources and actively seek out reasons why they are trying to lead you to certain things.

In particular, the question to be focusing on is "What conclusions am I expected to be drawing from this story?"

If you don't find them, I'd like to hear about your sources. They must be something exotic and small, because every name brand I've ever examined is pretty busy telling me what to think, not neutrally reporting news.