What is a trusted source? How can I find one? I think this is close to impossible. Of course, everyone reads what one consider "trusted" source, but I have doubt any of them is.
> So, for example I followed a Ukrainian youtuber who said he was leaving because of the invasion, that added considerably to my confidence. Also, meeting refugees arrive in the UK displaced from the Russian invasion made for near 100% confidence that it was actually happening (a video of a couple of tanks on a highway just looks like propaganda however, but the tanks were probably there, something happened [it wasn't impressive enough to be AI generated!]).
But does this prove anything at all? E.g. half of my family lives in Ukraine. You wouldn't believe and it's never mentioned in Western media, but large percent of Ukraine population is Russian. Actually, it's almost impossible to distinguish who's Russian and who's Ukrainian. What is the difference? My family is originally from Ukraine, but I consider myself Russian.
So, my relatives from Ukraine were always telling me completely different stories from official Western stories. E.g. about neo-nazi movement in Ukraine which became very active since 1991 according to my relatives.
> What is an example of a large lie that you see in Western media today, that you confirm to be untrue from direct personal experience?
I do not collect such stories (what would be the point?), but meanwhile I'm looking for some examples, I'll tell you that for several years I've browsed Western media and specifically searched for news from Russia on CNN, Washington Post, Bloomberg, and other prominent Western media websites.
One thing that is impossible to ignore is that all news from Russia are strictly negative. Even if they're true, this is clearly one sided presentation of situation to demonstrate to Western readers that "Everything is bad in Russia". I couldn't read anything positive about Russia in English for many years. It's always the same bingo bullshit composed out of "dictatorship", "bad Putin", "bad Russians", "Russian hackers", yadda, yadda.
I've just did a search `russia site:https://www.washingtonpost.com/`. While I cannot pinpoint an outright lie, because there're tons of results and I don't have much time now, you can easily see that there's a common theme in all the news articles: "Russia is bad", "Situation in Russia is awful", "Some unnamed source confirms that Putin is bad/afraid/eats babies for breakfast". Whatever year you put in the search: 2023, 2022, 2020, 2018, etc.