I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.

"If you don’t read the newspaper, you are uninformed. If you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed."

What Twain actually published was: “Often, the surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the strict truth.”

(If you prefer a more recent source: “It’s better to be uninformed than misinformed. I even doubt some of the pictures I see in the papers.” (Orville Hubbard) )

A commenter at Chicago Boyz wrote that he tries to interpret news stories using a simple procedure: determine the bias, and then assume the opposite of what the story claims. As a rule of thumb it has the obvious problem that every now and then a liar tells the truth. Benny Hinn does not appear to be honest, no matter how much the WaPo hates him. AVI has some thoughts about liars here.

How do we figure out what’s real?

We can go to our trusted sources, and trust them: Just like everybody else does. How do I verify my own sources? “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.” (Feynman)

We’ve lots of news sources. Sometimes they tell the truth. How do I know when?

Truth is generally binary, but unfortunately the probability that I trust a story is on a spectrum. If I have seen the scene myself, I consider it very true. OTOH, I don’t always know the context, and … “There’s a Bene Gesserit saying,” she said. “You have sayings for everything!” he protested. “You’ll like this one,” she said. “It goes: ‘Do not count a human dead until you’ve seen his body. And even then you can make a mistake.”

If the story is from a known liar on a topic which he has lied about in the past and has an interest in lying about again, I judge the probability small. But not zero—as Twain noted, you can lie telling the truth—just leave out important context.

I can ask: suppose the bare facts of the story (strip out the emotive stuff) is correct. What context is missing? Sometimes I can infer the missing context from "What would X be likely to do, and how would CNN interpret that?"

I can assume that if CNN reports on politics or social mores the report is false; either false in its facts or false in its framing. But what if they report on a storm, or a revolution in Chad, or a new business? They have no obvious reason to lie, except of course the reporter’s need to have an interesting story on a deadline. NYT and Daily News reporters have been known to make stuff up—not that long ago, either.

And sometimes politics and corruption invade what ought to be non-political realms. Remember Lysenko? Stories about his work might have seemed like science, but behind the scenes it was ideology down the line. Stories about this business or that (especially green ones) are sometimes puff pieces designed to spur investment in the bubble.

These will probably trip me up, unless I have some prior knowledge about the situation. Often if you remember prior stories about the same topic, you’ll notice that the “breakthrough” is incremental at best and rate the story accordingly. I don’t know about you, but my memory isn’t that prodigious.

I can estimate that if a report is consistent with what I have heard and believed already, it’s probably true—but those who believe the NYT and CNN do the same. I need to be sure I’m not in an echo chamber.

I can cross-check. Do I hear the same elsewhere?

The masters of smear and of advertising have learned how to spread their stories around so that they appear to be verified independently. Sometimes many outlets grab the same press release independently. Can I tell what the source was from reading the story? Sometimes yes. If I can’t figure out what the source is, that counts against the story’s veracity.

Can I check the source? I’ve had a hobby of researching science reports in the media and comparing them to the originals—and a depressing hobby it is, too. By the time the telephone game plays out to the clickbait headline, the research often isn’t recognizable.

Does the story make sense? Someone (haven’t found the quote) wrote that an Englishman would commit any crime, do any treason, before he would walk Trafalgar Square without his pants. I was solemnly told back in 2016 that there was pedophilia dirt on Trump that was being kept secret. Tell me that Hitler regularly vacationed in London in 1943; it’s just as plausible—the secret couldn’t be kept.

Similarly, we were all solemnly assured that Vladimir “my country stays afloat with hydrocarbon sales” Putin wanted Donald “fracking” Trump to win the election in 2016. Nope; that’s an obvious lie. The advantage of it is that I could note who trumpeted it and put them on my liars list.

At end of the day, unless I’m willing to put in work to find out the truth, I’m not going to get it.

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Maybe a case history showing how I tried to understand a story would be helpful. Or interesting. Or boring.

Let me use a relatively simple story: Wuhan 2019A aka Covid-19 aka Wuflu aka horrible plague aka “nothing-burger.” (I have family and friends who were knocked down for 3 months with it. That’s not trivial.)

The first stories were about Wuhan, the Diamond Princess, and the Italy disaster.

Wuhan reports were of a contagious and dangerous virus, and that the government was using extreme measures to halt it. They had a motive to lie—The same one all dictatorships do—underplay the problems, trumpet the good things. Announcing problems is against interest; we could assume the problem was at least as bad as they claimed. The Chinese released a RNA sequencing of the virus, which sounded like they’d been working on it for a while, but were offering info in good faith. And they claimed some success using hydroxychloroquine. Since they were confessing problems, and seemingly acting in good faith, I could give some credence to the early stories.

The Diamond Princess showed that it was deadly, but only a few percent would die, even in a population that skewed older. It was a nice controlled environment for testing, with few confounding issues. Some people stayed sick for a long time (see personal experience above). The Diamond Princess owners would have had a great incentive to lie about illness aboard their ship—bad PR—but the Japanese didn’t. It seemed trustworthy information.

Reports from Italy sounded like a true disaster. Unfortunately, they didn’t come with the demographic details that would let one compare it to the Diamond Princess numbers. How much excess capacity did Italy have? If none, any plague will have people dying in the halls. Things sounded bad, but when you started asking questions about rates, the numbers weren’t there. The Italians didn’t seem to have a reason to lie about it, so the information was true—but not complete or useful.

I did not listen to the news. I gather from its effects on other people that the media played up the danger-danger-danger aspects.

Hydroxychloroquine seemed a very odd medicine to treat a virus. (I had taken it weekly for years as a malaria prophylactic.) So I went to Google and looked up the papers that dealt with that. (I trusted Google not to hide the information. Why would they lie about medicine? Politics, sure, but why bother to lie about this?) I skimmed the papers I found, and learned to my surprise that the drug has been used against viruses too, and that the Chinese tests against Covid were preliminary and low-statistics, but positive.

A doctor claimed positive results in Europe, in another low-statistics sample. A later study using it on gravely ill patients found no benefit—I hope to no-one’s surprise here. So far, these reports seemed reliable within their limits, and didn’t contradict each other.

At this point I started taking a little more note of the news and found that chloroquine was now claimed to be both useless and dangerous (heart issues—actually retinopathy is the more common risk). From what I knew now, neither claim could be justified. Chloroquine had been proved not to be a miracle cure for the dying, and the heart risk was far lower than the risk of the disease. From a reporter I could expect such exaggeration, but these came from health officials—or at least the officials never seemed to correct a misinterpretation. Somebody was lying.

Why would they lie? Just because Trump had said the drug might be useful? That’s an unworthy motive, but I sounded a sample of acquaintances and concluded that they were prejudiced to believe that anything Trump said was a lie and must be opposed. I could no longer trust that NYT/CNN and even the FDA/CDC could tell the truth on what ought to be a non-political question.

At the same time, I started frequently reading the chloroquine was a miracle drug and anti-Trump people and big-pharma in search of expensive new drugs were suppressing it. (Chloroquine hadn’t been proven useful yet—that would take a large study. I looked at one of the meta-studies that asserted that it wasn't useful, and wasn't impressed.) Oops. I couldn’t trust the “right-wing” media either. (The claim about big-pharma isn’t easy to prove or disprove.)

Skipping to the present—YouTube and Facebook have been caught deleting stories about the disease. They claim this is merely deleting dangerous misinformation. No doubt some of it is—but how do I know that? I can’t rely on the search engines to find unskewed information. I can’t even rely on DuckDuckGo: it turns out to rely on Bing, and Microsoft has already been caught censoring stories on China’s behalf.

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I am not advocating utter skepticism. A lot of the news stories are more or less accurate--or would be if they were ever followed-up on. My stint on a grand jury gave me an appreciation for how inaccurate crime reports can be.

But I try to cultivate a "not proven" attitude to the news--especially early reports.