Journalists

 Can we start with the fact that journalists for major news organizations have generally been trained as journalists.  They have spent countless hours honing their craft.  They are better at it than you are. They are better at it than I am.  They are better at it than random people on the internet.   At major news organizations stories must be vetted by the editorial staff.  Are there mistakes?  Of course.  Are there journalists who bend the truth or violate their own organization's standards?  I'm sure there are.  There are going to be people in every discipline who manage to do a sleazy job for various reasons.  The fact remains that the reason you can generally trust the stories from major news organizations is because of the oversight and guard rails they put in place to minimize the chance of a faked or wrong story.

What is the job of a professional journalist?  Journalists report news, and are generally in the business of trying to find wrong doing by the people in power.  They work really hard at that.  This is dangerous work because the people in power generally do not want to be found out.  The further in the wrong the power people are, the more they don't want to be found out.  They will do almost anything to destroy the legitimacy of a story and the credentials of a journalist who writes a story that shows them in a bad light.

Are mainstream journalists left wing radicals?  No, unless holding people in power accountable is a left wing radical idea.  Most journalists lie somewhere in the middle of the gray scale and the rules of their profession suggest they should live there.  Journalists actually fall all across the spectrum.   Imagine a graph moving left to right from zero to 100.   A perfectly balanced journalist would land right in the middle of the graph at 50 with their approach to the stories they write being a perfectly unbiased mix of thoughts and words and facts presented in a totally unbiased manner.  Some journalists get pretty close to this ideal, but many do not.  Do average journalists tend to come at their stories from a liberal or leftist point of view?  When you look at that graph are most journalists to the left of center (liberal) or to the right of center (conservative)?  I would think that the graph would be marginally oriented to the liberal side.  The graph would be a traditional bell curve with the large center of the bell (the grey world) being just a bit to the left of the fifty mark.  Why would this be?  I think it is because the beliefs one holds when choosing to go into journalism tend to line up with liberal ideas of fighting injustice and fighting for fairness and equality and trying to help the little people as they strive to be heard.

What does this mean if the mainstream press tends to lean somewhat towards liberal ideals?  It means that somewhat more than half will write their stories using the facts that support their point of view on the slightly liberal side, passing over to some extent facts which might validate a different point of view.  The people on the right side of the graph, slightly less than half of the total, will do the same thing on the conservative side.  It means the words they use will likely slant the reader towards their belief system, just like the people on the right side of the graph.  It does not mean in any way that they will stop doing what they were trained to do;  find and report on important news stories.  As you get further towards the edges of the graphs there will be fewer journalists on both sides and they will be more biased in their coverage.  

With that in mind how can we deal with conspiracy theories?  The first thing to realize is that there are a whole bunch of journalists very motivated and trying to prove the existence of each conspiracy theory.  If they can prove the theory they will win every journalistic prize to be awarded.  With actual conspiracy theories there is no proof to be had.  Inuendo?  Yes.  Tidbits of fact that if woven together just right point to a possibility?  Sometimes, but the journalists trying to weave together the theory never find the right connections.  The theory falls further apart the further it is investigated.  Suggestions that the theory pushers have soon to be revealed facts that the general public is unaware of?  Almost always.  If they had those facts I guarantee a journalist would confirm them and publish them in an instant.  Unfortunately for those that believe those "facts" are never revealed for they don't exist.   Perhaps a new weaving of unrelated factoids that cannot be corroborated is revealed, but never anything substantive.  

This leaves us in the gray world where spiffy exciting 

Ir must frustrate legitimate journalists when they work through a story doing all the leg work, finding sources then corroborating their information with other sources, writing an article and publishing it only to find that someone can call it fake news without