[ericmay]

Nah, that’s a false equivalency because you’re equating “some corruption exists” like in the US to ~99% corruption as it exists in China w.r.t how it seems you are defining corruption in the mainstream press.

Because unlike China there exists enough of a free press, from institutions down to individual bloggers and professors, who can jump on the Internet and write almost anything without repercussion and if they write something very good or very important it’ll be spread.

[__d]

I think you're both over-estimating the situation in the US, and under-estimating the situation in China, but you're right: there's a difference.

My point is that _trusting_ news organizations is dumb. None is trustworthy. Whether their coverage is manufactured/absent/biased because it's required by the government, required by the owners, required by the editor, required by the organizational culture, or even a side-effect of their workload, nothing is trustworthy.

I'm not sure there was ever a time that the press could be trusted, but it absolutely cannot be trusted now.

[ericmay]

Personally I don’t find “trust nothing” to be very useful or practical. My local TV news reported that the Ohio Senate introduced a bill to do X and they reported that an estimated 26 people died the other day due to a tornado or series of tornadoes in Mississippi. I’m supposed to not trust that reporting?

[__d]

Everything is information. It might be accurate, it might not. Personally I would not _trust_ the tornado report: maybe it was 25 people or 27? What motivations might there be to exaggerate or diminish the number? Disaster reporting often exaggerates during the initial phase, and then corrects (or not) later. In that case, perhaps errors are more likely to be a lack of knowledge, to reflect hearsay and confusion between agencies?

I think it’s an important to maintain an attitude of skepticism, to be aware of sources of error, and biases that might be at play. Blind _trust_ in information sources is foolhardy.