If their epistemology is "warped", what's a non-warped epistemology, and where do we find it?

Thinking about recent news as an example, allegedly a tweet by someone with a $8 checkmark calling insulin free dropped the stock price of a pharma company. There was a graph and everything. This is a thing many thousands or millions of people now believe.

However, if you look at it carefully, you might discover that the most often used graph's y-axis is misleading, and it was only a 2% drop made to look much bigger. Or that the dip actually started a day before the tweet. Or that many pharma companies also dropped at the same time. Or, if you're brave enough, that the primary cause of high insulin prices is the FDA.

Believing in the "conspiracy theory"-like set of thoughts that journalists tell stories they like, journalists distort the facts all the time, and journalists hate Elon Musk can be highly predictive: It told me that something is off with this story and I shouldn't take it seriously, before I even had to check. Correctly so.

What was the reaction on popular subreddits instead? Immediate acceptance. Discussion of how this came to be. Calling stock valuations entirely fake. Vague death threats against Musk, Big Pharma executives, capitalists in general. Blaming the right wing. Predicting the fall of Twitter and legal action for this. Lamenting how easily large mobs can believe such brazen lies, ironically.

Anyway, if you can't trust Forbes, Fortune, Snopes, Business Insider, The Independent, Financial Times, all of whom wrote suggestive articles linking the tweet with the price dip, but never mentioning or downplaying any of the pertinent facts that are one google search away that clearly show this is mere coincidence, whom can you trust? And if someone says this is probably coordinated action instead of sites just copying each other - given that the existence of groups like JournoList where journalists collude with each other has leaked in the past - is he a "conspiracy theorist"? And if there are no trustworthy sources anywhere, how do you learn anything about the news?

Fret not: This is still useful information. When you know what liars want you to believe, you can get often indirect knowledge of that the truth must have been. If someone has a coin and wants you to believe it is biased, "this coin is clearly biased, I got 5 heads in a row" without specifying e.g. "5 heads in a row in the first 5 flips" tells you that the longest streak he could manage was 5 heads in a row, which means a pro-head bias can't have been very high. It also tells you that he had no easier/more convincing method to show bias, so it involved the hard work of flipping a coin (an expected number of) 62 times, and reporting the longest streak instead of the average. It's hard work to do the Bayesian updating math, but it tells you that you should consider it more likely that the coin is fair now, not less.

What conspiracy theorists often do is approximate this sort of thinking. When journalists tell them X is true, they look for reasons why X is false, or reasons to falsely report X is true now instead of earlier or later, and usually find some fairly clear-cut ones. Are they wrong to do so? They're in an adversarial environment. Such an epistemology makes sense.