> Facts are not opinions

They're also not handed down from God. A "fact" is socially constructed, and while the simple-minded among us can afford to pretend that a "fact" is handed down on clay tablets by a deity, they can only do so because they're downstream of a complex and decentralized system for determining what we consider high-confidence enough to communicate as "truth" to those in need of it (eg children). This process includes dissent and "disinformation", and it's baked into everything from our media environment to the scientific method.

> More and more, people are distrustful of large media organizations, which at least historically have a commitment to doing what they can to report true facts

Lol. Forget picking up a history book, all you need to do is read the news for a week as critically as you would read a blog or tweet and you can find plenty of examples of agenda- or simply ignorance-driven inaccuracies in the most mainstream and well-regarded publications. It's ludicrous to claim that media as a whole "does what they can to report facts" and that that inoculates them from being challenged. They've certainly got standards that the average person doesn't, but those standards are barely even commensurate with the responsibility they have, and the divine right to Facts that the ignorant blindly imbue them with. If you're reading any source uncritically and assuming it's Fact, you're doing it wrong.

> However, you don't have a right to hold up another set of facts as valid without evidence.

Another loaded assumption which doesn't hold up on its own. Nobody cares about the case where a wild assertion is made with no attempt at evidence. ~Everyone has "evidence" for their claim. The quality of the evidence varies wildly, both in its internal consistency and in how it comports with external models of the world. What's determining your worldview is what you implicitly dismiss or accept as evidence, based on your own biases and unconscious reasoning (given that your proposal is tantamount to turning off conscious reasoning about the truth). It should be obvious why this is far inferior for anyone with a brain to reading different sources, weighting them by credibility, and synthesizing your own model. You don't need to be particularly smart to be a journalist, and layered on top of that are all kinds of perverse incentives that don't point towards "truth". The notion that you should blindly outsource the process of a final determination of your model of the world is beyond insane.

Was it "fact" when the media universally reported that the pandemic was to be ignored[1], and wrote articles mocking companies for distancing? Was it fact when they universally and confidently rejected masks as useful? Should I have been protected from the "disinformation" that sounded the alarm early, leading me to look into the science and determine that both of these narratives were dead wrong[2], or at the very least suffered from a cultural inability to reason under uncertainty?

The key insight here is that the interaction is two-way: if enough heterodox ideas are on firm footing and contradict your external model of the world, you should be digging into your external model and considering its weaknesses and what to tweak.

The pandemic is an incredibly bizarre time to choose to tear down society's truth-generation system. At every single stage, I've been at least partially at odds with public health advice due to 1) noticing flaws in public health reasoning, 2) exposing myself to contrary narratives/analysis that your definition would call "made-up facts", 3) reading the relevant science, 4) shifting my understanding of the risks. Again and again and again, "the Truth" has caught up to me weeks or even months later, while my friends have blindly been following the narrative off a cliff and exposing themselves to more risk _and_ more restrictions.

Again, I'm aware that most people are not remotely capable of this, and I don't begrudge them that anymore than my basketball teammates begrudge me being too short to dunk or block as well as they do. But the idea that we should tear down the process by which we arrive at truth because having to use their brains make the black-and-white crowd uneasy is infuriating. By all means, continue to uncritically swallow media narratives; you'll be wrong a lot more often, but at least you won't have to use any neurons. But it's insane to decide that nobody else should have access to analysis that isn't pre-approved just because you don't want a reminder that being an adult in a complicated world is difficult.

[1] "Get a grippe, people", as the Washington Post so memorably phrased it in just one example.

[2] This isn't just theoretical: I told the older folks in my extended family to stock up on non-perishables while The Truth was still saying "forget the pandemic myth, go to the parade today!", which meant my parents and other high-risk family members (some in areas hit very hard in the first wave) were able to ride out the risky first month of the pandemic without leaving their house. The reason everyone listened to me without question is because I have a track record of being right when the media is obviously wrong, due to, you guessed it, my exposure to what you'd term "disinformation" and ability to avoid uncritically swallowing whatever Vox tells me is true.