How a fake persona laid the groundwork for a Hunter Biden conspiracy deluge

MSG Joseph Cristofaro - I never saw concrete proof for the suckers and losers charge to trump. In that case I say the "left media" is wrong. In the same breath, I say there has not been any credible evidence for this Hunter Biden narrative. Are you willing to say the same for the right wing media? I am coming out and saying I don't agree with the "left media" for putting out stories without merit? What say you in regards to the right wing doing it?

MSG Joseph Cristofaro - Correct and I am pointing out the right. I think we both agree news sources right or left that report things with no solid evidence is wrong and that is progress of a kind.

MSG Joseph Cristofaro - This gets back into why we do and don't believe different sources.

Most of us believe that the news networks have been pretty honest in the fact of the reporting but not unbiased. Their history tells us this. So when we say anonymous sources, we don't know who they are but they do. So yes, there is an implicit level trust there in the factuality of the history of their reporting. If you remember that there was a prominent Buzzfeed story that proved to be untrue during the Mueller investigation, you may also recall that the other news sources didn't carry it. Why? Because they couldn't verify it despite the fact that it was sensational and fit the bias of networks like CNN. That's why we find them more or less trustworthy (but biased). Buzzfeed paid a terrible credibility price for that.

When looking at the sources on Biden we have no trustworthy or even worse sources that have been caught lying multiple times without consequence (Tucker Carlson, Rudy Giuliani). Not at all the same thing.

This is how people are fooled. They are told not to trust predominantly factual news sources (always citing a few mistakes, because there will always be some), then when fact checking sites pop up to try and separate the ones that mostly tell the truth from the outright liars, people are told not to trust them for the same reason (since they are run by people too and there will always be a few mistakes to be found and pointed to). That just leaves the people who believe them throwing all rational analysis out the window and only trusting things that tell them what they want to believe. Which is of course the point.

MSG Joseph Cristofaro - You are correct that trust is earned, but from a impartial reading many mainstream news media outlets have earned a reasonable level trust on factual reporting.

As far as the Biden story there is no physical evidence of wrongdoing. I've got news for you, rich people getting jobs they "are not qualified for" happens all the time and is in no way unusual. The only "physical" evidence of actual wrongdoing is some documents Tucker Carlson claimed existed but were "lost in the mail" and some hard drive no one has seen but Giuliani claims was Hunter's. What is the history of Hannity and Giuliani on telling the truth? Not good, they lie and lie frequently. Not make mistakes, but just plain tell whoppers that they must know are lies.

Compare that to the taxes or the "losers or suckers" comment. What's the history of those news sources on the existence of the documents they say they have on the taxes or on having a source that relayed what they heard from Trump? Those sources have shown themselves to be accurate a very high percentage of the time. On the taxes in particular I suspect they have physical evidence for.

This is how we unemotionally evaluate sources of information. It's no different than evaluation of intelligence sources.