ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the epistemology of news stories, narratives, and rumors. We start out by considering the empirical question of whether contemporary journalism is balanced and the epistemological question of whether it is rational or irrational to consume a partisan news diet. We then move on to the recent furor over “fake news” and “misinformation,” terms which philosophers have attempted, without much success, into cogent and intellectually useful conceptions. We close by considering a new argument for skepticism about our political beliefs due to Blake Roeber, which holds roughly that, since our political beliefs will always be based in part on information we’ve learned from others and we should always be skeptical of political information we’ve learned from others, we should be skeptical about our political beliefs.
