[api]

> There is an alternative. It is you and I.

How do I tell the difference between an honest citizen journalist, a propagandist, a liar, a lunatic, or a troll?

Conventional journalism of course is not perfectly trustworthy, but at least there is some penalty for extreme untrustworthiness in the form of loss of reputation of the paper and its brand. The NYT is an illustrative case. My opinion of that paper dropped significantly after its role in providing only the most softball criticism of the (then impending) Iraq invasion. I'm not the only person I've heard say this. NYT paid a price for cheerleading for that disaster.

[banads]

>How do I tell the difference between an honest citizen journalist, a propagandist, a liar, a lunatic, or a troll?

Critical thinking skills, independent research, and open dialogue

[orwin]

> Critical thinking skills

A lot of people stay at the dunning-Kruger peak on that for a very long time and over-evaluate their (i for sure did for several years at least).

> independent research

Those who have the time to do this for half the semi-important issues in the world are lucky(like most of of on HN i think). And i started 2 month ago informing myself about climate change and what does it mean to stop using oil, i did not have any time for myself between that and work until recently. Research takes a long, long time if you wnat to do it well. I'm still not certain about anything.

> open dialogue Yes if it mean what i think, this is very helpful. Paper journal used to offer opportunities for that.

[banads]

Yep, it's definitely not easy. Nothing worth doing is.

Many prefer poisonous fast food to a healthy home cooked meal, just as many prefer to read twitter comments and click bait than to read a book

[gregimba]

> I'm still not certain about anything.

You captured a facet of climate change I feel few can properly articulate. Modeling and digesting complex systems is incredibly difficult and at this point I share the same position.

It seems to be we have no clue how severe the impacts of climate change will be but based on gut feelings we are in for the same problem as technology development.

> We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.[0]

[0](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Amara)

[thu2111]

I'm not sure there's a penalty. NYT subscriptions have been going up, not down, despite it frequently reporting things that are bizarre or factually wrong. Same is true for many other papers.

That makes sense: people often buy newspapers for the analysis that reconfirms their own world views, and gives them intellectual ammo for their pre-conceived notions.

With citizen journalists (a.k.a. bloggers) they start out with no pre-existing reputation so tend to depend on other ways to quickly build credibility, like using lots of hyperlinks to sources so you can check their claims, or leaving comments open so commenters can criticise and respond. Even today in 2020 it's standard for news articles to provide no citations or hyperlinks at all, even when e.g. the entire report is about a research paper, and often comment sections are now closed. Exactly because so many commenters would often point out flaws in the articles!