[tensor]

I personally value opinion very little. For me, the quality of a news source is my primary concern, both in factual correctness and minimizing bias. With a collective such as traditional news organizations, at least historically they lived and died by their reputation for quality. Fact checkers finding a single poor article affected the reputation of everyone writing within that organization. This makes it much easier for consumers to figure out which institution to trust.

Now with the internet, anyone can publish. Unfortunately it has become infeasible to fact check every single person. Even fact checking one individual often doesn't pay off, you spend a ton of time checking them, only to get a very small stream of information.

This is the primary problem with self-publishing. Because of this I've pretty much given up on reading most self-published material. Unless the author comes from a well regarded institution or otherwise there is an easier way for me to judge accuracy I'm just not interested.

No doubt this viewpoint will offend most people here, but to me this is the biggest problem society now faces. Probably even more dangerous than pure opinion, is content that is mostly factually correct, but contains a small lie. This sort of biased content or intentional misinformation is both very hard to identify, and the very effective at propagating lies.

These days I mostly use academic journals, as peer review is at least some form of quality checking. I do also use a few select large news sources, though with less trust. I've given up on medium articles and similar.

[nradov]

Lack of fact checking on the Internet is a bigger problem than nuclear weapons or anthropogenic global change? I doubt it.

[snicksnak]

And who checks the fact checkers? Just 20 years ago the news media landscape was very different, the outlets had so much power, so much in fact, that they played a vital role in convincing the american public to go war. Totally unchecked. Now the lost their monopoly and therewith their power and they don't like it.

[wombatpm]

I would love an automated way to submit articles to googlish fact checker. Something that auto categorized opinion from facts and provided links to support fact classification from a user selected list of sources.

[tensor]

It is, because misinformation is the biggest factor in stopping humanity from addressing these big issues.

[jfengel]

There used to be a time when editorials were the insights of people who had spent decades in the news business. They could reasonably be thought to know more than the average person on the subject. A newspaper should offer facts, but it offers only the new facts, not the history needed to judge the facts. They just can't; there's too much. That's for textbooks.

Editorials were supposed to provide a leg up on that. They were journalists working in the field, who would often know even more information than appeared in textbooks. They would have spoken to all of the major players and knew not just what they'd said and done, but what their personalities were like.

It wasn't supposed to be a substitute for your own education and judgment. But it could provide a counterbalance to it. It puts perspective on what your own education and experience amount to. It provides a convenient checkpoint against Dunning-Krugerism.

Unfortunately, editorials no longer serve that function. Opinions aren't even a dime a dozen; they're a dollar per thousand impressions. Young journalists don't get the experience to become old journalists and then editors.

Which kinda leaves us stuck. Academic journals are great if you can read them, but they assume even more background than newspapers. They're the cutting edge of a field, written for others at the cutting edge of the field, and simply don't address anybody who isn't at least working towards a PhD.