Cherry picking

Anyone wishing to conduct a historical, social, or (geo)political analysis should always start without preconceptions, gather sources of various orientations, evaluate them, cross-reference them, test them, and check the reliability of those who disseminate them, only then to analyze them, extract the key points, and arrive at a conclusion. However, that conclusion must always be handled "with kid gloves," keeping in mind that the consulted sources are second- or third-hand and the true motivations of those who curated them are unknown.
The climate of polarization that now characterizes any debate has wiped out even the last traces of the method just outlined.
The new guidelines, used both by armchair experts holding court at the local bar and, unfortunately, by many professionals, have now become entrenched like this: 0) if you don't already have the conclusion ready, you don't even start the research; 1) simplify complexity by polarizing the problem with the most ridiculous Manichaeism you are capable of; 2) decide which pole to root for based on the starting conclusion, the one from point 0; 3) look for sources that corroborate your totally arbitrary position, cheerfully giving zero damns about verifying their truthfulness and reliability; 3) discard the ones you dislike, for no other reason than the fact that you dislike them; and 4) thus reaffirm the conclusion you had already reached at the beginning anyway, namely point 0.
It might seem paradoxical that a conclusion is packaged right from the start (point 0) and also that it takes all that work to go from the starting point to the starting point (point 0 again): trust me, within the polarized paradigm, it is empirically demonstrable that this tactic works great.
There are also auxiliary techniques that can come in handy: insults, shouting, moral blackmail, targeted changes of subject, far-fetched comparisons. There are tons of them, try asking ChatGPT. In fact, if you don't have time for the tedious proposed process, you can ask your favorite AI agent to give you the exact conclusion you were looking for, complete with junk sources attached.
P.S. You might be wondering what the title means, assuming you are one of the two or three people who made it to this point in the story. If you like English, these are two key expressions: "Cherry picking" and "Fact-checking".
The first, a wonderful metaphor, refers to the choice of sources, done just like when you want to pick cherries from a tree: you only take the ones you like best.
The second concerns checking the facts cited by the sources. You obviously don't need it, because you carefully hand-picked the sources and, since they serve to confirm the conclusion already written at the beginning, they have no need to be subjected to further filters.
Moral of the story: remember cherry picking well, so you can use it when needed. But remember fact checking even better: to stay as far away from it as possible!

This post was machine-translated from Italian.