That and the super informed people who were experts on literally anything you could ask(most of the time)

I’m going to let you in on a secret: what was actually happening most of the time was that random pontificating dicks would authoritatively make shit up on topics they read about once. It became easier to tell if you spent time with subjects you knew a lot about. It reminded me of this, where Michael Crichton was talking about his friend Murray Gell-Mann and a trend they had both noticed in newspapers:

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.