The total disregard that journalists have shown for facts in this saga should be a red flag that they're equally full of it when it comes to reporting on things that we aren't so knowledgeable about.
I remember watching this happen as a teenager via two sources of information: BBSes and the early Internet, and the mainstream media.
The mainstream media told me Weaver was a child abusing neo-Nazi cult leader who was stockpiling weapons to conduct terrorist attacks or overthrow the government or something.
The non-mainstream media told me he was a reclusive survivalist eccentric that may or may not have harbored some white supremacist beliefs (goofy or offensive beliefs are not a crime) who was being taken down dramatically in a frantic attempt by said government officials to cover their rear ends for a botched entrapment attempt.
History proved the former to be all lies and the latter to be largely the truth.
I never really trusted the news again. Stuff like this just proves my teenaged loss of faith was right. Newspapers and TV media are just "some guy's blog."
That is not to say I trust the "alt" media either. It's media too and over time I've seen it become more and more full of crap as money has come into the equation. Now it seems like mostly a sales channel for dodgy "natural" pharmaceuticals and populist political propaganda.
The only way to deal with this is to find multiple sources with competing agendas, see how each of them report and frame the news, and read responses to each by their opponents. Frankly, it's exhausting and a huge reason my news consumption has wildly decreased.
I've toyed around with this idea but ultimately it feels like trying to sober up by drinking a wider variety of booze. You're assuming that someone is even trying.
In the end it's just made me an equal opportunity skeptic.
It may be a good time to revisit Kurosawa's Rashomon again. YMMV but it might explain a lot of contradictions we feel about how agenda drives the narrative.
I say this every time I read an article approaching my areas of domain knowledge. (And yet I keep reading the articles.) Thankfully we have forums such as this one where more context and clarification and correction can come out.
