I never really understood why people can’t piece together the information that is presented to them instead of just taking things at face value. Is media literacy not taught at all in schools?

Time constraints are a major factor. I theoretically could read the same story from many different sources and do a comparative analysis on them to attempt to determine what the real story was. But then it would take more time to just find out about one story. And then I wouldn’t have time to read about other things are happening and I’m less informed.

And really I wouldn’t be getting anything more than if I just read or watched the CBC. If the CBC has a quote form Justin Trudeau, what are the other sources going to add to that? Their interpretation of what Trudeau meant by that remark? How certain parts of social media is responding to it?

If Justin Trudeau says something, or a person is charged with a crime, or a piece of legislation is passed, these are facts. Things that happened.

Generally mainstream media (bad actors like FoxNews and PostMedia excepted) covers these facts fairly well. AP News for world news, CBC for Canadian news and it’s basically all covered. The mainstream sources generally won’t report unconfirmed sources, so if I’m particularly interested in a story I may seek out other sources, knowing the sources will be more unreliable. Indy media is hungrier and will be willing to publish unconfirmed information, I know that when looking into it.

But for the most part this is time consuming. If the source you’re reading in indy media today does get confirmed, I’ll read about it in AP News or CBC tomorrow. But if it turns out to be a false rumour, you’ll see it, may not see the retraction the next day, while I’ll never seeing it at all.

I mean you are reading five different sources and tracking the sources you get your information from to make sure there isn’t a retraction later, right? And then checking back on all of those sources every day to ensure there was no retraction? That’s what you mean when you say “You can read anything on the internet and use your rational mind (if you are educated so) to filter out the truths.” Because if you aren’t doing all that, how do you know that something you’ve read might be false information? Critical thinking only works if you have the time to gather large amounts of data to apply it to.

For most of us, it’s more efficient to just get news from organizations that confirm their sources and do the due diligence for us. My critical thinking tells me that the CBC and AP News isn’t going to throw away the many decades of work to build their reputation just so they could misquote something Justin Trudeau says, which would be very easy for anyone to prove they did.