So again, how do you propose one actually does this? Via crowdsourcing on FB? AI-generated news gathering? Consulting with a medium? Like what is your actual, concrete solution for how to obtain and distribute events and occurrences?

Journalism may be as imperfect as the humans who do it, but it's at least a concrete, operating means of informing the general public, with an ideally healthy array of outlets having overlapping coverage of the same events. Within this framework, "do your own research" would be called "reading broadly".

> ... And no, none of that was because people believed the "all the entities are wildly rotten and corrupt" "meme". It wasn't ever that they just didn't trust the system enough.

I have been around long enough to know that the meme does fit for some non-negligible section of the population. It's not to say that the system hasn't given a lot of people good reason for doubt, but a lot of people were already primed to throw the baby out with the bathwater and declare everything a conspiracy.

There are lots of valid ways to research things for oneself.

None of them involve making fun of people for doing it.

> Journalism may be as imperfect as the humans who do it, but it's at least a concrete, operating means of informing the general public,

Sure. Reading journalism can be part of doing one's own research.

> a lot of people were already primed to throw the baby out with the bathwater and declare everything a conspiracy.

Who primed them?

Here's a 'fun' and illustrative story that recently unfolded: Did you know that the 4chan forum where the Pizzagate conspiracy - which used the same code words as Epstein's circle - opened the exact same day that Epstein met with its founder?

That meant that when whistleblowers talked about real things that happened, or real emails leaked, some people were 'primed' to dismiss them because obviously Pizzagate was a hoax.

Some journalists did report well on that scenario; people like Whitney Webb or Sarah Kendzior. They didn't get invited to mainstream media to talk about it though.

... There are a lot of people who believe one of the dumbest conspiracies possible - that scientists are in cahoots over a global warming hoax. Why do they believe that? Could it be that the fossil fuel companies who knew climate change was real in the 70s helped to foster that? Could it be that the media who profits massively from running fossil fuel ads have been complicit?

It's not okay to have like 6 billionaires running all your media. It's not okay to have <80 familes owning half the worlds wealth. You end up with all these terrible cognitive side effects in your population from the propaganda they use. Blaming all that on people doing their own research is essentially blaming the victim, at the worst possible time.

I'm expressing frustration at the lack of a proper answer, which you still seem to not be able to provide.

> Who primed them?

Conspiracy theory influencers, cult leaders, unscrupulous politicians, other people with existing mental illnesses, corporations with a lobbying agenda - the list is as long as there are people with a motive to influence the populace to their own gains.

> Here's a 'fun' and illustrative story

You're providing a single example (without any references, btw) as a means of exonerating your entire argument. But sure, pizzagate is suddenly looking a lot less dismissible out-of-hand now, given we've come to learn the sheer extent of Epstein's web.

I agree that much of the disinformation re global warming is at least funded by corporations and individuals with a profit motive; I agree that the concentrated ownership of the media and wealth are highly problematic.

But pumping the "do your own research" schtick and ignoring that it is a term highly co-opted by conspiracy theorists (as well as others with an agenda to misinform) is hardly helping.

So again, I ask: what is your concrete alternative to Fourth Estate?

Sorry, you think the choice is between people doing their own research or having a 4th estate?

How odd. I don't know if I've ever met anyone with such a binary.

To be as clear as I possibly can, though I did already answer this: doing your own research and having actual journalism exist are not mutually exclusive things. They go very well together.

However, as the quality of media falls, the necessity to do your own research to get an accurate worldview increases.

Republicians. By declaring all parts of the government are full of fraud and incompetence. By "doing there own research" aka not really and just lying and misrepresenting things they didn't really research and didn't really understand. I mean it would be 1 thing if they actually found fraud and incompetence but republican appointed bodies like Doge were to incompetent to find any appreciable fraud that IGs were not already proscuting.

Its been this way for a long time ever hear of the Golden Fleece Awards, these were given to 'useless' basic research projects the government funded. I think the key take away being that do your own research gets equated to the government cannot do research and we won't trust any government research that doesn't comport with our worldviews. The irony being several of the reciepts of Golden Fleece Awards actually turned out to be very usefully and highly impactful economically speaking.

> that scientists are in cahoots over a global warming hoax.

I kind of reject this claim because the suppression of research especially at places like EXXON, or the teflon people did not come from the scientists generally speaking, but rather from the business interests above them who did not want that research to be shared and owned it. Public Scientist later exposed it and the irony here is that the very thing you are saying won't get exposed got exposed but the system your condeming. Main stream media is not the Fact finding body when it comes to research, it is the propogation business. The do your own research crowds I have experienced ignore the Science Fact Finding Groups regardless of the results because they are no doing research they are vibing their beliefs.

> It's not okay to have like 6 billionaires running all your media.

I agree 100% here but doing your own research doesn't change this incentive, this exists because we don't have resonable taxes and monopoly laws. I'd argue (in agreement with the other guy) that do your own research on everything becomes a distraction to actually getting the above things passed to handle this problem. How do enforce the monopoly laws when you haven't done your own personal Market wide analysis the conditions of beef after all we cannot trust others to do that. And I think this is the sentiment of the other poster in the thread group is trying to give and i tend to agree with it.

The government likely cannot make 10 decisions better than you personally can, but the government makes billions of decisions everyday probably more than you'll make in your entire life. The scale is the problem government solves and not trusting anyone doesn't necessiarly produce higher quality results boardly

Hate (well, love) to break it to you but the Exxon thing was exposed by... One person, doing research.

Neela Banerjee. And she didn't work for one of the media giants.

After she brought the hard proof which had lain dormant for 40 something years, yeah the mainstream media eventually put it out there. They didn't have much choice at that point, did they.

The scientists didn't expose it. The business people didn't expose it. The mainsteram media didn't expose it. They all got paid, all while the Earth got hotter, and hotter, and hotter; more and more reliant on fossil fuel.

> I'd argue (in agreement with the other guy) that do your own research on everything becomes a distraction to actually getting the above things passed to handle this problem. How do enforce the monopoly laws when you haven't done your own personal Market wide analysis the conditions of beef after all we cannot trust others to do that.

Mainstream media isn't ever going to tell you how to end the media monopoly. The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.

> not trusting anyone doesn't necessiarly produce higher quality results boardly

I didn't say not to trust anyone. I said that believing everything from rather obviously compromised and corrupt institutions isn't a rational way to get to grips with reality. That's as true of fossil fuel science as it was our pandemic response.

So she discover climate change alone without data publically available from Scripts, the EPA, and NOAA. She just one day knew without the work of scientist who came before her and discovered the green house gases. And the eneromus media campaigns that backed Al Gore inconvienent truth? Because remember she did all of this in 2015!

The whole point that is being made is that it was not just that one protagonist hero that just solved everything. Because Scientist, Politicians, and the media all partcipated in exposing climate change. Neela, and trust me i appreciate her going specifically after Exxon, do this as part of institutions that allow this investigation to exists. Not to just stick it to them. Malovalent people and organizations exists but in your board stroke of saying main stream is bad builds an enviroment where it is impossible to do good things. Because what is good is not obvious, what is corrupt is not obvious.

Claiming it simple so we just need to not trust any corrupt institituions is corrosive. We can have a diference on what to do about the current sitution but institutions can must exists that demand we argee and what the sitution is, that has to be non-partisan and hardlining the 'do you own research bit' makes describing a shared reality partisan because anything you do like you can 'do your own research' and discover that you are 100% right.

> Mainstream media isn't ever going to tell you how to end the media monopoly. The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.

Also ironically they did and have, media was a large reason Sherman Anti-Trust act became viable. It becoming mainstream thinking, that Monopolies are bad, was forged by Economists and Engineers propogated and communicated by media. An opinion forged by collective research and understanding, and most important consenses building of a shared reality.

And also I am not saying do your own research is bad inherently but rather the narriative that follows it is, is that scientist did not do effective research, media did not expose lies but hid them, the list goes on. You can absolutely not have that perspective but its the banashee that will follow you when you hardline distrust in institutions. Because the idea doesn't choose because obvious is anything you want it to be. We've seen it before, Exxon discredited insitutions in the government as not knowing the science, its what allows the current adminstration to protect pedophiles. When the government is lying we need to call it out but their is no greater threat society than stoking mass distrust in carciture instutitions.

P.S. I like the back in forth and respect the frustration you have but I think there is a mix of factural holes in the narative you have especially around climate change.