The claim made is that you can’t trust anything from either periphery. But consider what that does: it immediately moves you from evaluating truth claims and logical claims on their merits to looking first and foremost at the source, and it moves you immediately away from the serious consideration of truly conservative views. It moves people immediately to the Left who might have been otherwise willing to consider conservative views.
Much of the propaganda of the last 50, perhaps 90 or so years (remember FDR had admirers of both Mussolini and Stalin working for him. The Mussolini fan led the New Deal, and the Stalin fan came up with the theory behind it, and the name itself), has been oriented around redefining what constitutes a “moderate”.
I consider myself a moderate. I am not opposed in principle to government sponsored social welfare, I am no longer a reflexive hawk, I support the legalization of most drugs, I support our police and military, etc. My policies, of course, I have discussed often.
What I DO demand, though, is sanity. I want a politics grounded in mature, sober, intelligent, and responsible thought, backed by competent action oriented around concrete, measurable results. This demand, alone, drives a wedge between me and much of the ideological spectrum, between me and most Democrats, and between me and many Republicans.
Our political system is ludetic. It is a game, governed by game like rules, which is not fundamentally interested in using the power of government to reliably and responsively improve people’s lives. My tax money is not really an investment in my own well being, at least not a lot of it. I like having a fire department, and police, and highways. But our Defense apparatus is grossly larger than what we really need. We don’t need the ability to project power in Asia. Global Communism is dead.
I don’t want to rant too long. I have things to do. But the core point I wanted to make is that all truth claims, all logical claims, need to be evaluated on their own merits. Yes, some news sites seem to lack credibility. But all the major news sources have prostituted themselves at times. The New York Times, which used to be, somewhat but not entirely rightly, considered the gold standard, has whored itself out to political advocacy repeatedly. Simply because something appears there does not mean it is true.
The process of comparing multiple sources is an old one, but remains, I think, a good one.
But nothing will EVER take the place of critical intelligence, memory (vitally important in our Memory Hole world made worse by the loss of paper records as primary sources), and to some great extent, time and effort, thought and consideration.
There is no website you can go to which will tell “the Truth”. To claim otherwise is already to engage in lies. I have my preferences, but I trust no one completely.
And I will point out too what seems not to be an obvious point to many: conservatives do not seem themselves as slanting one way or the other. We don’t take “The Truth”, then spin it to our needs. The Left does that.
We believe that our views accurately reflect the world as it is. If Truth is centrism, then we are in the middle, and most of the current world is in various far off places to the Left of us. Islamic Mullahs would be to our right. We are the Liberals. We are the moderates. We are the protectors of political freedom, philosophical principle, and the concept of absolute human rights. Everyone else is lying, or trying to roll these things back directly, as with Islamic Fundamentalists.