I always think that you can tell when a 'narrative' is being pushed in the news when there's an obvious lack of dialectic examination of the issue at hand acros

I always think that you can tell when a 'narrative' is being pushed in the news when there's an obvious lack of dialectic examination of the issue at hand across multiple outlets (even better when the same keywords are used across publishers). This was observable during the WMD, Russiagate, and yeah, the HCQ stories, and many other issues. It's a pattern which, if you read many sources of news every day (thanks RSS), you can spot pretty quickly. The other thing is hyperbole, which may be a little harder to discern if you don't have direct experience with the subject. I used to take HCQ regularly so was pretty "read up" on the health impacts. The fear-mongering I was seeing in the news about the risks was a bit much. A common refrain about Trump is that if he publicly said cancer was bad, the media would advocate cancer for everyone. I don't know if it's better or worse that journalists wear their politics on their sleeves these days, but the one person out there who still regards journalists as competent objective reporters should probably read the mess they make of science and legal reporting and then realize the same level of competence is applied to domestic and foreign affairs reporting.