Who can you trust? By Infantry Dort.
The amount of trust I have in a person is directly proportional to how many legacy media hit pieces they attract.
My first thought was: good heuristic for evaluating public figures!
My second thought was: No, wait. Sometimes the legacy media attacks genuinely bad people.
My third thought was: …but this happens surprisingly seldom. Why is that? A few seconds of thought reveal the answer.
When you’re policing an orthodoxy (and the legacy media definitely sees its job as policing an orthodoxy) the most dangerous person isn’t the one whose beliefs are radically different from the orthodoxy, but the deviant whose position is just close enough to attract converts from within the orthodox mass.
Heretics get burned more often than do unbelievers.
So yes, InfantryDort is right. Probabilistically, trusting public figures that the media constantly does hit pieces on is unlikely to tangle you up with the genuinely evil and crazy, and much more likely to point you at truth-seekers.