Secondhand Reporting

Lying through omission reached a fever peak with the Biden narratives. People trust community notes more than anything now.

We are truly living in a post-truth world.

Agreed. But kind of odd that you find this point to be best illustrated by citing a poorly researched article while ignoring that we have a president right now holding rallies where he claims we have the greatest economy in history and that his tariffs are in fact being paid for by other countries while right wing media stays almost entirely silent.

I am surprised if left-wing media reports that. Usually, they are busy creating fanfiction with 1-minute clipart.

I would love to hear your examples of fake experts from your opposing religion. But that audience is the polar opposite, I would assume, for assigning virtue to unvetted credentials.

I'd really like to see a foil to Alan Lichtman, a wildly over-credentialed and media-elevated partisan hack that sacrificed every shred of integrity to signal a Harris win.

Maybe Dr Oz? Or maybe Dr. Oz was too honest about being an entertainer instead of a walking encyclopedia of all things?

I would love to hear your examples of fake experts from your opposing religion.

That’s the difference between today’s political right and the left (aka broader society). On “the left” an expert is someone with actual credentials earned through years of experience and proven results. There is, by definition, no such thing as a “fake expert”.

But on the MAGA right, a person’s expertise is evaluated against whatever the dear leader and the right wing podcast sphere says. Agree, and you’re an expert. Disagree and you have Trump derangement syndrome.

So yeah, that’s how my religion works. it’s called critical thinking, and I am a devout follower.

There is, by definition, no such thing as a “fake expert”.

It would just be someone who claims to have a lot of expertise in a field but doesn't. Such as Ryan Jordan, who pretended to be a university professor for years and was elected to top positions on Wikipedia.

Agreed. But kind of odd that you find this point to be best illustrated by citing a poorly researched article while ignoring that we have a president right now holding rallies where he claims we have the greatest economy in history and that his tariffs are in fact being paid for by other countries while right wing media stays almost entirely silent.

Trump is not an academic or an "expert". For one thing, his job is as such that he can say whatever nonsense in public and still do the job (or at least sign the papers his advisors wave in his face) in private, unlike an academic/expert/journalist whose entire purpose is to produce/disseminate factual information. You could argue that it's possible for such a man to come to believe his own lies and start making decisions on the basis of unbridled delusion, but at the same time there's no way to prove that -- and Venezuela, at least, seems a straightforward example of White House policy being tangibly shaped by the people advising him (re: Marco Rubio).

And while it's unfortunate that Trump lies as readily as he breathes, everyone expects it at this point, and most people just tune it out as white noise. The effect of one known liar on public trust is not as damning as to behold vast institutions, especially the quiet bureaucracies that keep the machinery of complex modern society running, where nobody inside can be trusted not to perjure themselves.

Again, the author of the PBS article in question is not the only person here who can be reasonably implicated in dishonest behavior. That includes the authors of all the secondhand articles which held it up as a source credible enough to singlehandedly debunk a presidential administration's talking points significant enough to be the official casus belli for a military intervention abroad. I don't know how big this list is, but it at least includes the author of said CRS article, which was likely read by Congressional staffers who help inform the behavior of their bosses.

You might say that "the fish rots from the head" but this was not behavior they learned from Trump. Left-media is and has always been opposed to Trump. This is behavior they learned elsewhere, or that emerged naturally within their own spaces.

It would just be someone who claims to have a lot of expertise in a field but doesn't.

Yes but the phrase was presented in the context of prominent figures on the left whom the left turns to for information, implying that we prop them up not because of their credentials but because they are telling us what we want to hear.

You might say that "the fish rots from the head" but this was not behavior they learned from Trump.

I’m really not sure what your point is. Sometimes people, even journalists, get things wrong. And sometimes other people rely on information someone else who provided it got wrong. Getting something wrong =/= dishonesty. You would need to demonstrate intent, and you don’t seem to even be trying there.

There is no parallel between the level is untruths you can cherry pick out of the millions of articles written everyday in this country vs having a President who can’t even tell the truth about who won a presidential election. If you’re going to talk about living in a post truth society, start with the latter.

implying that we prop them up not because of their credentials but because they are telling us what we want to hear

Well I don't agree with generalizing everyone on the left that way, but I wouldn't say there's "no such thing" as that happening. If you go far enough left, I think that Karl Marx's level of expertise is commonly exaggerated.

PBS is merely a "public" institution by virtue of public [our tax dollars] funding. I do not believe public funding is its sole source of funding. It is, otherwise, just another bias media outlet with its own opinions variably shared by different presidential administrations which overlook "public" institutions under the grand umbrella of the executive branch's agencies. As such, its "pronouncements" [read propaganda] is also variable in accuracy.

Arguments Regarding Bias

1. Public Perception and Trust: For years, polls commissioned by PBS (e.g., GfK Roper) have consistently ranked it as the most trusted and unbiased national institution in the United States. A 2025 study found that many Americans trust PBS precisely because of its public funding and perceived independence from commercial pressures.
2. Independent Analysis: Media bias monitors like Ad Fontes Media have classified PBS NewsHour as reliable and "left of center," yet still closer to a centrist, fact-based position compared to many other news outlets.
3. Allegations of Bias: Conversely, critics, particularly some conservative politicians and media watchdogs, frequently label PBS as a "left-leaning," "radical left-wing echo chamber". In 2025, accusations were made by lawmakers that the network pushes liberal propaganda, including on topics like race, social issues, and children's programming. 

PBS has a tiny audience share by modern standards. We’re talking single-digit percentages of Americans in any given week. There are individual YouTubers pulling more daily viewers than PBS gets in prime time. That alone should set off alarm bells when someone says “many Americans trust PBS.” 90+ percent of Americans don't even listen to it. PBS isn’t widely trusted; it’s deeply trusted by a few people.

And pretending that’s a credible skeptic metric representative of the entire country is just sloppy academic laundering.

Millions of Americans watch PBS, with over 130 million people tuning in annually and around 100-120 million monthly viewers.

Sorry, I meant sloppy AI.

“Most Americans watch PBS” is statistical fan fiction.

Actual monthly regular PBS TV viewers:

about 25–35 million adults

(that’s Nielsen-style “watched at least some PBS this month")

Actual core audience (people who watch PBS on purpose):

Around 5–10 million.

Prime-time PBS audience at any moment:

1–3 million, on a good night

This kind of endless bullshit is why I prefer a more nakedly colonialist justification for things like resource extraction. People aren't buying the old song-and-dance. When it comes right down to it, the argument from the American/European side is 'we have an advanced society, we developed these extraction technologies, therefore we own the resources extracted through them'. The argument from the third world economies is 'these resources are on our land, so we own them. You can get a cut for introducing your technological savoir-faire, but at some point ownership has to transition to the people who live in this country - otherwise our population is suffering from the externalities of extraction like pollution while all the profit flows to foreign investors'. At the end of the day, from a framework of 'everyone is equal' bullshit, the third world argument seems more reasonable, and all the international court decisions will simply be framed as an attack on non-American interests. America is trying to have its cake and eat it too - it's trying to appeal to these gauzy ideals of internationalism and economic development when at the end of the day these Western countries are only interested in sucking the smaller countries dry.

Check the PBS site for the real numbers.They are much higher.

I have to disagree with this take for two reasons.

First, specific to Venezuela, this isn't a case of foreign companies gobbling up the oil rights back in the 1920s with the imprimatur of a tinpot dictator flanked at all times by g-men under the employ of an American banana conglomerate and then still being there 80 years later at the start of 2007. Rather, the democratically elected government of Venezuela, two decades after the 1975 nationalization, voluntarily invited the oil companies back in the 1990s because it thought this deal would be of economic benefit to the country. Venezuela entered into the contract of its own volition and then reneged on its end of the bargain.

Second, you act as though "introducing the technology" was a singular act that happened sometime in the early to mid 20th century. In fact, the Western oil industry continues to develop new technologies and export access to such abroad. For example, one bit of trivia about the current sanctions regime on Russia is that it's meant to block Russian access to tech that, in a few years, they'll need to drill deeper when shallower reserves are depleted. In a recent conversation with my dad, who worked on a rig in the Gulf of Mexico back in the '80s, he attested to how drastically less efficient the whole process was back then compared to today.

It's well documented that Maduro raped the resources of Venezuela far more than any agreed-upon cut with foreign powers investing in resource extraction. He literally let rigs succumb to rust and salt till the pumps stopped pumping, and then moved on to the next pump. He took every cent of that money to fund his personal army. Foreign companies could never be able to do anywhere near that level of exploitation without a full army at their beck and call. Think Leopold II. Real resource devastation requires sovereign coercion, not just a profit motive. There's zero chance the USA public would allow anything close to what Leopold II or Maduro did.

Here is what's really going to happen: the USA govt will quietly pork-subsidize US oil companies to manage the fields with the next spending bill for one reason and one reason only, to secure the petrodollars of the Oil extracted and sold around the world, and to deny BRICS their own currency trading that petrol. It's actually true when they say they want to sell the oil and give a lot of the proceeds to Venezuela, but the real reward for the USA is the securing of ...what is it 19% of the world's oil reserves in US petrodollars? That's a massive win for the USA.

I have to disagree with this take for two reasons.

First, specific to Venezuela, this isn't a case of foreign companies gobbling up the oil rights back in the 1920s with the imprimatur of a tinpot dictator flanked at all times by g-men under the employ of an American banana conglomerate and then still being there 80 years later at the start of 2007. Rather, the democratically elected government of Venezuela, two decades after the 1975 nationalization, voluntarily invited the oil companies back in the 1990s because it thought this deal would be of economic benefit to the country. Venezuela entered into the contract of its own volition and then reneged on its end of the bargain.

This is an inherent problem with democracy. You can ink a multi-decade contract, but it is only ever worth the paper it was written on. If the people of that country decide they are getting a raw deal later on, they always have recourse to the barrel of a gun. Companies should invest in foreign markets with this always in the back of their mind. We also did the exact same thing to TikTok - forced a foreign company to divest ownership then sold it off to Israeli loyalists once to information being promulgated on that platform went against our government's (well, really a foreign government's) interests.

Governments also typically don't randomly break contracts and seize foreign assets. Usually there is an attempt to negotiate. This attempt was made before Chavez's nationalizations, and many oil companies balked and left. Chevron didn't, accepting a minority stake and agreeing to the government's terms. Now they are uniquely positioned to reap the rewards of a Venezuelan oil boom. I think they deserve to profit from playing the long game and that Exxon and Conoco were short-sighted and stupid for pulling out; they only have themselves to blame for failing to react nimbly to changing conditions.

Second, you act as though "introducing the technology" was a singular act that happened sometime in the early to mid 20th century. In fact, the Western oil industry continues to develop new technologies and export access to such abroad. For example, one bit of trivia about the current sanctions regime on Russia is that it's meant to block Russian access to tech that, in a few years, they'll need to drill deeper when shallower reserves are depleted. In a recent conversation with my dad, who worked on a rig in the Gulf of Mexico back in the '80s, he attested to how drastically less efficient the whole process was back then compared to today.

Yes, this can happen in multiple waves, and it did in Venezuela. I think this underlines rather than undermines my point.

The U.S. capture of President Maduro and attacks on Venezuela have no justification in international law. The oil belongs to Venezuela.