Seconding this. The fracture at the heart of our society is not rooted in unintelligence, or lack of education or access to facts. It's rooted in a lack of trust. The most rigorous science is only as good as the trust people place in those performing it (and the entire chain of reporting from there to its reception). Those links are being/have been broken. No amount of added rigor will fix that. I don't know what will.
I'd argue it's the opposite. We've relied too much on trust and promises and not enough on rigor and exactness. Most people aren't given facts, constraints and limitations until it's too late, if ever. What they're given are viewpoints with selective evidence and glaring omissions. It's remained a unsolved since the beginning of humanity. A solution to this problem is a rigorous self-proving system that wouldn't need one to convince another of the facts.
I don't want to live in a trustless society. What you describe sounds like a totalitarian dystopia to me.
I want escape hatches. I want plausible deniability. Facts in a vacuum are useless and can be used to propel all sorts of narratives. Facts without framing and contextualization aren't worth much. You can manipulate easily without technically lying, just by cherry picking facts that suit your agenda.
You need some amount of trust and solidarity if you want to live in a healthy society.
> Those links are being/have been broken. No amount of added rigor will fix that. I don't know what will.
The institutions could start telling the truth once in a while. Statements like "27 police officers injured during largely peaceful anti-racism protests in London" (BBC) and "Fiery but mostly peaceful protests" (CNN) with the city burning down in the background account for why trust in media is rapidly approaching zero. It makes it clear that the violence and devastation is just a curiosity to the upper-class elites that control these institutions, but normal people who actually have to live with aftermath are not amused.
Fauci is another huge contributor. First don't wear masks, they can actually hurt. Then you have to wear masks. Now wear two or three! But earlier he was ridiculing people who wore multiple masks. Along with all the knowingly false statements about how long lockdowns would last. Clearly Fauci should not be allowed to speak in public, but unfortunately the blast radius of his mistakes extends beyond him to the government and media institutions that defend him and amplified his misinformation.
I get that you're complaining about 'liberal' media downplaying disorderly and often dangerous events such as riots to suit a political agenda, but the converse is also true; if one relies on 'conservative' media then you'd think many major American cities are post-apocalyptic smoking holes in the ground.
My larger complaint was about rich people who don't care about the several dozen deaths, uncounted injuries, and billions of dollars of property damage caused by the riots because it doesn't affect their class. I don't watch conservative media, so I don't know anything about the portrayal of major American cities therein.
