The real issue is that we shouldn't just trust any news source. It doesn't matter how many times I've correctly told you that fire is hot, you should still be skeptical when I tell you this fire is not.
It's becoming rarer and rarer nowadays but you still come across pieces of real investigative journalism where claims are backed up by evidence. For example, a great piece of reporting from the Atlantic sometime a year or two ago was on truck drivers being abused by their employer. Of course it had plenty of anonymous interviews with some of the victims, but they went beyond that. One of the claims was that the employer was changing the log of when trucks were returning at night, so the authors sat outside and recorded when the trucks were actually arriving for a few nights and compared it with the employer's statement. They included their data in an excel sheet. Could they have filled that sheet with fictional data? Sure, but no one ever published the data from their own stakeout which contradicted it.
When journalists include verifiable evidence in their stories, it takes their reporting to another level where you no longer rely on their trustworthiness and everything that doesn't looks like a tabloid in comparison. Rather than maintain those high journalistic standards, many traditional media organizations have rested on their laurels and relied on their reputation to distinguish them from their competitors whose reporting is otherwise indistinguishable. Calling their competitors fake news is just an extreme form of competing on brand awareness instead of quality.
Now obviously in the modern world with instantaneous communication a lot of stories are going to break before someone has had the time to thoroughly dot all the i's and cross all the t's - that a rumor exists is newsworthy regardless of whether the rumor is true, and the full details of many stories will not become clear until months or years after the fact. If the white house claims there are WMDs in Iraq, the NYT should tell us that the white house is claiming that. The difference between a good source and a bad one is that a good source will publish the evidence they were shown or include prominently that the white house made those claims despite offering no evidence.
Trust no one, especially those asking for blind trust.
It's becoming rarer and rarer nowadays but you still come across pieces of real investigative journalism where claims are backed up by evidence. For example, a great piece of reporting from the Atlantic sometime a year or two ago was on truck drivers being abused by their employer. Of course it had plenty of anonymous interviews with some of the victims, but they went beyond that. One of the claims was that the employer was changing the log of when trucks were returning at night, so the authors sat outside and recorded when the trucks were actually arriving for a few nights and compared it with the employer's statement. They included their data in an excel sheet. Could they have filled that sheet with fictional data? Sure, but no one ever published the data from their own stakeout which contradicted it.
When journalists include verifiable evidence in their stories, it takes their reporting to another level where you no longer rely on their trustworthiness and everything that doesn't looks like a tabloid in comparison. Rather than maintain those high journalistic standards, many traditional media organizations have rested on their laurels and relied on their reputation to distinguish them from their competitors whose reporting is otherwise indistinguishable. Calling their competitors fake news is just an extreme form of competing on brand awareness instead of quality.
Now obviously in the modern world with instantaneous communication a lot of stories are going to break before someone has had the time to thoroughly dot all the i's and cross all the t's - that a rumor exists is newsworthy regardless of whether the rumor is true, and the full details of many stories will not become clear until months or years after the fact. If the white house claims there are WMDs in Iraq, the NYT should tell us that the white house is claiming that. The difference between a good source and a bad one is that a good source will publish the evidence they were shown or include prominently that the white house made those claims despite offering no evidence.
Trust no one, especially those asking for blind trust.