Bear in mind some of those may be opinion pieces and some may be journalism, those need to be considered separately.

The line seems to becoming increasingly blurred these days.

I advocate for something like consumer warning labels on products: you cannot call something Aspirin unless it is truly, chemically Aspirin. Nobody should be able to label their product "News" unless it is strictly Who/What/When/Where; also, opinion and editorial should be required to be labeled clearly as such. Something akin to the Fairness Doctrine (now defunct) might be a place to start.

A thorny issue to discuss, but given the current state of "journalism", I think it's worthwhile.

This is great.

How much healthy information vs how much sugary fructose information!

Going to repeat this to hopefully spread the idea.

Without commenting on the factual nature of the content or the content itself:

The biggest headlines for you aren't the biggest headlines for me. And I get quite a different view on mobile than I do on desktop. On mobile I get blasted by the coronavirus and economy sections, which are mostly gloom-and-doom (the article about a possible vaccine is far far down the list in a different subsection). On desktop those sections are there front and center, but the other stuff is visible too, so it's not quite so in-your-face.

CNN has multiple articles/videos about the exact same topics, but the headline---although any individual headline arguably represent its article technically accurately---are not equivalent to each other.

Consider:

"Dow and Nasdaq plunge after record highs" vs "Stock Market Bloodbath: Down and Nasdaq plunge"

"Trump suggests voters should commit fraud" vs "Trump encourages people to vote twice -- which is illegal" vs "Trump appears to encourage North Carolinians to vote twice to test the system"

So, from my point of view very different pictures can be painted with just:

1. Choice of headline.

2. Choice of presentation/order.

3. Choice of material to cover.

My takeaway is that, no, I can't trust it. A charitable interpretation is that the headlines are technically true, but designed to get me to click on them. That's not truthful. (Other interpretations may also be plausible, but would require more evidence.)

Edit: List formatting

> Moreover... "Appeared." If the author believes Trump was saying that, then say Trump said it. However, the author knows that's not true, so the author said he "appeared" / his words could be twisted. Utter cowardice.

Trump is so confused and unclear sometimes that it's hard to tell exactly what he's trying to say, hence the "appeared.". What he says is newsworthy, and some of the most likely interpretations are shocking, so it can't just be ignored. It wouldn't surprise me if he advised his supporters to do something that clearly amounted to voter fraud without actually understanding that it was fraud.

> Where Trump clearly explains that people should go to their polling places so that the poll workers can check the voter rolls and confirm whether their ballots have been received. If so, then voters will be turned away. If no, they'll already be at the polling place and will be able to cast a ballot. You, I, WECT, and CNN all know that Trump isn't saying to lie about whether you mailed a ballot. To say otherwise is to lie.

I don't know how it is in North Carolina, but where I live they never ask if you've already mailed in a ballot at the polling place. They just ask for your name, look it up in the voter roll, and cross it off, and give you a ballot.

North Carolina accepts absentee ballots postmarked on election day (https://www.ncsbe.gov/voting/vote-mail/five-steps-vote-mail-...), so following Trump's advice could potentially bypass the poll worker check if the poll workers are like those in my state. I believe North Carolina has other checks to prevent double absentee/in-person votes from being counted, but fraud is still fraud if the deception doesn't work.

Where I live if you are registered to vote by mail and you show up at the polling place on election day, you have to vote provisionally, which means that you have to make a sworn statement about why you are weird, and your ballot will be subject to additional verification to make sure you had a right to cast it.

> Trump is so confused and unclear sometimes that it's hard to tell exactly what he's trying to say, hence the "appeared.".

It's irrelevant what he's "trying to say". If he writes "covfefe", the accurate reporting is "he wrote covfefe", not "he appeared to have written covfefe".

Qualifying something with "he appeared to say" is just a way to write anything. Turns out it's not at all what he said? "Well, it appeared that way to me, don't tell me how I have to perceive reality!"

> It's irrelevant what he's "trying to say". If he writes "covfefe", the accurate reporting is "he wrote covfefe", not "he appeared to have written covfefe".

You're asking for a raw transcript, but that's not what the news is. For instance, when the OJ trial was in the news, do you think the papers should have just printed the court reporters transcripts verbatim? The news make judgements about what's important, then summarizes what happened and adds context necessary to understand it, which requires figuring out what he was "trying to say."

> If he writes "covfefe", the accurate reporting is "he wrote covfefe", not "he appeared to have written covfefe".

Actually, if you want to be really nitpicky, "he appeared to have written covfefe" is the most accurate. No one saw him type that word. It could have been some social media aide instead.

The video in the tweet you link to is explicitly as in the headline: Trump tells people to mail in a ballot and then to go vote in person. He repeats it multiple times and is very clear that the "check" is done by them attempting to actually vote, not merely asking to confirm the ballot was received. I had really assumed it would be much more ambiguous than this from the headlines.