And yet I don't repeat the same information everybody else has.

Yes, various media buy stories from wires like Reuters and Associated Press. I also worked for a newspaper at one time, and we had more journalists than other staff. My late father also reported for Reuters in his early life.

That said, the reason people say the same thing is because their source of information is exactly that - the news media. It is not books written by hundreds of thousands of different authors. And it's only looking at their local media.