"extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"

[Aletheia]

Carl Sagan did say "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".

For example, if someone claims to have tossed a fair coin 3 times in a row and have got "heads" each time, that isn't a particularly unlikely event, and it wouldn't take much evidence supporting the claim to raise your estimate of the chances of the claim being true to above 50%.

If someone claims to have tossed a fair coin 300 times in a row and have got "heads" each time, that's a staggeringly unlikely event, and you'd probably need to hear from multiple independent eye witnesses before you'd raise your estimate to above 50% that the coin was actually fair (rather than, for example, a double headed coin).

I think something similar might be applicable when discussing events happening inside a war zone.

Normally you don't have to triple check the sources for a news story appearing in the mainstream media, before you're willing to put some faith in the media not having massively distorted the facts.

But extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures.

When you know that most of the media outlets with direct access to the warzone are going to be partisan, then you need to go beyond your normal precautions about checking the accuracy of a news story before posting it.

[Momto2boys973]

I agree.