Sources!

I spent a chunk of the day arguing on the internet with a guy I went to high school with and who apparently turned into an enormous shithead since those days, that or he always was and I didn't know because being a high schooler I was kind of a shithead myself and had little grounds for comparison.

Anyway, the topic was on police brutality, specifically how it would be nice if they would actually face consequences when they beat the shit out of or murder an innocent person. My acquaintance, let's call him Assface, was of the opinion that the police can do no wrong and no one should attempt to criticize them, fuck you. I disagreed, as did virtually everyone else in the thread and the conversation went downhill from there, things were said, things I have no interest in taking back and I hope his legs are eaten away by fire ants.

As with most people defending an indefensible position, he resorted to fallacy, claiming that he had a better perspective on the issue because he came from a police family, thinking that just saying that is enough to make him right, additionally he attacked those of us who disagreed with him as having made our decision based on the media and thus obviously unable to see his point, this despite not actually presenting evidence or argument. He really focused on "the media" here, which got me thinking.

People shit on the media all the time, I do it myself of course, regularly, and they shit on people who cite media sources to back up their arguments, but when we are talking about current events, particularly in the political or social justice spectrum, what other source is there? Like, it isn't like I can go to the primary source of the cop who beat a kid into disability and get a fair and balanced answer to the issue, likewise the victim and his family have their own opinions that are likely fairly biased at this point. Who else should I rely on for the details other than media reports?

Likewise for political stuff, I can't go ask the president what he said about something, so I have to rely on reporters and the media coverage.

This doesn't mean you can't ever get a real idea of what happened. The raw facts reported are usually fairly reliable, the issue is you have to realize that there will be a bias in the opinion of the piece, and those facts can be presented in misleading ways, which is why if you really want to learn something about a particular news event, you read multiple sources and form an opinion from that, look at commentary from several different people and recognize the source, if it is a Fox News report realize it will be pretty conservative slanted, if it is Huffington Post take it as a given that it will be liberal in weird ways, if it is Drudge Report close your browser and go to bed, you have been on the internet too long.

So Assface says that we get our incorrect opinions from the media, let's give him the benefit of the doubt and say he is right, the media is entirely misleading on this issue somehow and can't be trusted, the problem then is he doesn't say who we should get the story from if not the media. If I am being unkind, I would assume that he prefers we get our opinions from him and not ask for anything that backs it up, and honestly I suspect I am right. His arguments boiled down to "I am right because I am right" and he never gave us any idea why.

Let's say he was someone in a position to know, no not just someone from a cop family, that is stupid, let's say... an attorney specializing in some area related to the cops, he works with them but is not of them, would his opinion be worth more then? Not if he presented it in the same way as he did in the real life thread, argument from authority doesn't work unless you present evidence gained from your authority. You still need to convince me, and even if you do, you cite cases you were involved in, and conversations you have had, it still doesn't make you right! The plural of anecdote is not data, and one person's experience is not enough to judge national policy trends. At best, it gets you some respect when you interpret stories about events that happen.

So all we have is the media for this, but that is a lot really, the 24 hour news cycle and the advent of social media, plus the fact that everyone owns a video camera nowadays, means more than one source will pick up a story, and a lot of information will come out on it, even unedited video posted by non professional media sources, take it as an aggregate, and you get a pretty clear idea of what is going on.

The media sucks, the major companies care more about the narrative that gets them viewers than the news, and the little ones and individuals tend to be either wildly biased, incompetent, or both, but they are what we have, and if you use them responsibly they still work to an extent.

They are certainly better than no source at all.