[Produce]

Step 1: throw all your newspapers in the bin, cancel your subscriptions and point all of the major news sites' URL's to 127.0.0.1.

Step 2: start reading scientific journals and other high quality sources of information.

Step 3: call all of your friends idiots for not doing the same.

Step 4: begin to hate your life more and more because you can't identify with the appaling ignorance that surrounds you.

Pessimistic step 5: throw yourself off of a tall building.

Optimistic step 5: build a rocket ship and fly to the moon.

Final disposition: you are no longer a part of society at large.

[a_bonobo]

Uncritically reading every scientific paper you come across and taking the information in there for absolute truth is dangerous and a problem many untrained journalists have.

You need to have a background in sciences and a minimal understanding of statistics to properly judge the results - is the sample-size large enough, is it varied enough, did they use the correct statistical test for correlation - lots of papers out there are absolute crap (either unrepeatable results or missing mountains of needed information), published just because someone was friends with the editor or all peer-reviewers were asleep that day.

Note: Even the mythical Open Access doesn't help with this problem, as there too are editors deciding in favor of their friends and peer-reviewers gone fishing.

[pessimizer]

Avoid step 3. Separating lies from truth in the media is a full time job. Most people have other full time jobs, children, and mortgages. Be trustworthy and explain without condescension instead of calling people idiots.

Caveat: this will help you to inform the people around you about what you think is true, but it will work even better if what you are saying is silly and appeals to everyone's prejudices.

[flatline]

Step 6: Realize that, however well-informed you may be in some narrow field, we are all woefully ignorant of so many other things that said knowledge is, in a broader scope, quite trivial, and that separating from society at large is just another symptom of said ignorance;)

[BCM43]

Tried this, don't have enough time to get past step 2.