I heard an article on NPR, didnt' catch which program, that discussed Doing my own research.
You often see people who brag that they did their own research.
In a small but controled study, this one researcher checked on the results of doing one's own research.
They found that those who did that were more likely to be wrong.
Why?
Well, they tended to use search terms like "the Biden crime family" and no legitimate news source ran stories on such a nonsense topic, but lots of mediocre and worse and pretend news pages did. So they found articles by ideologues, biased, and wackos (these are my words. I forget how the research described them.
I'll add that people who say they were do their own research don't mean that they will go to the scene of news and interview a lot of people who were there to find out the facts. They don't mean they will buy a microscope and look at germ cells to see what things kill them. They just mean they'll look on the web or the wacko weekly magazine they subscribe to. But the phrase, do my own research, makes them feel important.