Personally, I take everything I read with a grain of salt, and try (a) to sanity check against my model of the world and (b) to try and consider the core issues

Personally, I take everything I read with a grain of salt, and try (a) to sanity check against my model of the world and (b) to try and consider the core issues / agendas behind the different perspectives rather than what usually ends up as a proxy battle over some "scientific" details. I'm a bit wary it giving concrete examples because I'll emphasize, it's a personal process, but for illustrations sake: Re Covid vaccine, I definitely think there are multiple agendas, but there is really global adoption, and short of some unrealistic conspiracy theory, you would not see unequivocal recommendations like this if there were serious concerns. Covid was pretty clearly a big problem, and worth trying to stop. I think there is, correctly, pushback on whether people should have something like a vaccine forced on them. And that ends up provoking a reaction where people run to "scientific" arguments about effectiveness and side effects, but I see that as mostly noise that would go away if not for the spectre of some kind of compelled (or de-facto compelled) vaccination. Vaccines have a pretty well documented history of success, and safety so it's not like this is something out of left field. The most likely failing, if any, is simply that it doesn't work, not a dangerous reaction. So for me, in the balance, I got the vaccination. No idea if that's helpful or even coherent, just trying to give an example of processing different viewpoints. Edit: also, I like to read the "alternate facts" - sometimes you get an interesting perspective, often you can immediately see how incoherent and ridiculous some side of a debate is. But in all cases, I believe the "information" should be our there, even if ridiculous, for people to debate and reject, not gatekeeped by some enlightened elite that get to tell me how to think. Many people seem to have a problem with this last part, which should be more frightening than the potential for misinformation.