You can't do anything without trust, so drop the faux-contrarian cynicism. Seriously: everyday, you rely on thousands of facts that get to you via intermediari

You can't do anything without trust, so drop the faux-contrarian cynicism. Seriously: everyday, you rely on thousands of facts that get to you via intermediaries. News, obviously, but also the map data for your navigation, the lunch menu at work, the flier with your daughter's soccer schedule on the fridge, etc. Of that information, you can validate almost exactly zero from first principle. I have not, for example, ever verified that Japan exists or Donald Trump is president. So what you do is: you develop relationships of trust, with people (you are more likely to give your spouse the car keys than any stranger), or with institutions (google, New York Times, the Iraqi Information Ministry). These people/institutions have the interest of keeping you as a reader (or lover). That means even if they could profit from selling you out on any single issue, they would risk being found out and losing far more. It's iterated prisoners dilemma, essentially. Peoples' assessment of quality media like the Times or Economist has also become completely unhinged from reality. Re-read their coverage of both Mueller as well as the current Ukraine affair from the beginning, and it's astonishingly accurate. The Times had an almost complete if maybe rough outline of the Ukraine scandal on day two after the first rumours, for example.