[tchalla]

Wikipedias aim is to collect information not tell us the truth. It’s a mirror not a light. News articles are a source of information because they can be verified. For every claim where news articles have gotten wrong, there are 100x times “relevant sources” getting it wrong.

[hunterpayne]

I'm not sure that the media lately has been 100x times more accurate than a Ouija board, but I'm going to ignore that for now.

The point here isn't that the media is accurate or not. The point is they focus on the attention grabbing events not the important ones. There are basic metrics about the world which completely invalidate many political beliefs of both parties. Those are rarely if ever reported.

For example: - only 7% of the US economy is involved in international trade - renewables have a .1 (10%) capacity factor which means anytime they are used for baseload, they will never pay back the carbon produced in their manufacturing - Mississippi's per capita GDP is about the same as Germany's

Facts like these are rarely reported because they show how irrelevant most of what is reported truly is. That's the point.

[tchalla]

Your personal opinions and conclusions aren’t facts, you cite the “basic metrics” from a reputable source and Wikipedia will accept it. It doesn’t have to be a news article. Many of examples that you gave don’t stand a cursory scrutiny of being “facts”. Wikipedia has multitude of information citing basics metrics about the world.

[hunterpayne]

The 3 facts I presented are all from well attested sources, either government GDP numbers (although the Euro exchange rate changes impacts the MS vs Germany comparison) or from solar PV makers themselves. That you want to use scare quotes for them is why this is a problem. We are far more certain about those 3 example facts that almost anything reported in the media. You can look up those numbers quite easily and find that they are correct.

Facts like these influence your life far more than most of the things reported by the media. Yet you still want to use scare quotes because they don't match your personal opinions that are largely informed by mostly irrelevant things reported about. That's the problem being described by the article. You still don't seem to understand that.