Counting Stars and credibility

With some frequency I read comments from detractors of this blog disqualifying some information published here, saying that Contando Estrelas has no credibility or that it publishes false news.

Counting Stars celebrates 18 years with more than 17,500 posts and not a euro in subsidies
One year and 585 posts in four languages talking about the Russian invasion of Ukraine

With regard to fake news, what I always find is users of social networks stating that something published here is false, but without indicating what I am lying about or pointing out any information that contradicts what is here is published. In other words: even if you show them a fact or data, it has to be a lie because they want it to be a lie. There are people who do not tolerate reality contradicting their opinions, and when this happens they prefer to stay in their prejudices than admit the facts. This phenomenon is what we usually know as fanaticism.

Regarding credibility, some have a problem with this blog and that is that I do not appeal to the credulity of my readers, as many media outlets do every day, publishing news based on anonymous sources or in documents that the medium in question does not publish or link. Contando Estrelas has as a rule to make the sources of all its information available to its readers. For example, if I ever refer to an initiative approved by the Latvian Parliament, I take the trouble to go to the Parliament's own website in order to link the original document. And if that is not possible, I refer to an official source or -in certain cases- to what was published by other media.

In December I published a post referring to the resolutions of several countries, the Council of Europe and the European Parliament accusing Russia of terrorism. In the post I included the links to the corresponding texts on the websites of the parliaments of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland and the Czech Republic, as well as to the website of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and the European Parliament website. It is something that almost no Spanish media does. Curiously, some consider that what is credible is what is published by media that do not link those sources and not this blog, which does link them.

Obviously, this task is not easy. The entry in question involved searching for documents in Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian, Polish and English. Many journalists prefer to save themselves that work and just copy and paste the information sent to them by agencies. I am not a journalist, nobody pays me to do this work, but I like to publish rigorous information so that the readers of this blog do not have to believe anything, that they can verify for themselves if what is published is true or not. No.

I know perfectly well that some people don't care that I bother supporting everything I publish in this way. Publishing something rigorously is much more difficult than disqualifying that information "just because". In fact, some people dismiss as false some things that I publish before even having read them (I have come across this curious fact very frequently). I leave aside the curious fact that internet trolls who do believe parties that break their promises, then deny that this blog is credible when I am precisely dedicating myself to pointing out those broken promises. As I said: it is pure fanaticism.

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