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But aren't there a bunch of mechanisms in court for masking out information that colors the opinions of the jurors without being in fact pertinent to the precise questions asked? Ie. witnesses are supposed to answer completely, but they're specifically not supposed to give information that would suggest inferences that they don't have direct knowledge of? It seems to me that inasmuch as the media lies, it is in good part with additional information that would be struck in court - too much truth, rather than not enough.

(Sadly, there is no Media Judge to strike paragraphs for hearsay.)

Yes, and there's no opposing attorney to object to irrelevant testimony or to cross-examine and impeach the witness by catching them in a contradiction or revealing a "hidden" motive to lie.

It's all very frustrating for someone who is used to being able to directly attack seeming false or evasive answers on the spot, with a witness who cannot escape the questioning or shout you down.

The implication here is that we mainly have an epistemology crisis.

Most people aren't going to be as competent and trained in argumentation to spot these evasions but a big problem our society has is that even our "elites" can't spot them when the evasions are done as long as they're being done for reasons the NYT would support.

Implicitly their epistemology is "believe the implication of the NYT - don't look for the missing factual content or added non-factual content".

Very few people can reason out an epistemology on their own - most need to be educated in it. At the very least almost everyone needs to read about it and to do that one would have to find the right reading material. This means there's a lot of power in getting to set the ground rules of evaluating claims and installing a faulty epistemology - look at wikipedia and how it launders progressive claims through the "reliable sources" rule. The wikipedia rules are rules for deciding what should get printed on the site which implicitly makes them rules about discerning truth.

Progressives want to install rules like "trust the NYT" (which wikipedia has as a literal rule) because progressives known that other progressives control those institutions. Progressives still have a back door of "ignore the NYT when it says things we don't want to hear", of course.

The implication here is that we mainly have an epistemology crisis.

Strong agree.

Progressives want to install rules like "trust the NYT" (which wikipedia has as a literal rule) because progressives known that other progressives control those institutions. Progressives still have a back door of "ignore the NYT when it says things we don't want to hear", of course.

Yeah, it seems like the goal is to get the average person, or at least the average voter, to completely outsource their beliefs about the world beyond their immediate surroundings to """trusted""" third parties... whilst also ensuring that those third parties are never accountable for getting any given report wrong, or ignoring a relevant story, or even outright spinning or modifying the facts on occasion.

This is perhaps where the comparison to religious faith becomes most apt. Rather than perceiving/divining the 'truth' themselves, the people are expected to accept the church's edicts and bring any queries one has to the priests who can sort things right out and possibly punish nonbelievers.

At which point, the only factual disputes that may be permitted are interdenominational ones.