Yes! I totally agree. One word of caution before I go into my rant is that Politifact is owned by Tampa Bay Times and they have endorsed Clinton so they do have a pro-Clinton bias. They cherry pick her statements to fact check and they go super easy on her as far as rating them. In my experience, their bias is very strong.

The media has gotten completely out of control and as you said, when proved wrong, they almost never retract. I despair! And I’m talking about the outlets I once thought I could trust and I don’t know who to trust anymore. Sometimes you can get good information, like an actual document, in the most gawd-awful places and other times you get sheer BS from WaPo, like Capehart’s fake story about Bernie Sanders and when called out, he just doubled down with another article. Most of the media has been very biased against Sanders and down right very nasty ‘mean girls’ towards his supporters. And since the DNC leaks, we know why MSNBC and CNN have such a heavy pro-Clinton bias. Berners were right all along and they vehemently denied it (“Preposterous!” “Impossible!”) and dismissed us as conspiracy theorists. Then when proven right it turned into “Yawn” and “Of course they did. How naïve are you? So what? Quit acting like a child…” about having been cheated in an election.

You have to be very selective of what you believe and approach everything with critical thinking. Don’t dismiss something just because it’s right wing because sometimes they do have interviews with experts or documents, just leave the spin behind.

I have a friend who is a very sweet person and I love her to death but she will post anything and some of it is VERY bad and dangerous medical advice. She never even ponders if something is true or not and if the information is dangerous or incorrect. I struggle with it because I don’t want to be the one to always politely tell her she’s wrong but sometimes I just have to be the bitch, with steam coming out of my ears I’m trying desperately to control. Some forms of misinformation are harmful and some forms totally discredit you or what you’re trying to achieve. There are lots of weird conspiracy theories flying around the net right now. But for me, I demand some sort of proof.

Thanks so much for writing this.