Being an Opinion Leader

I am pretty sure most people reading this will have heard of the concept before, but it may be that I am only familiar with it because of my Journalism minor.
Take any given subject...let's say...movies.
Now I don't know much about movies at all. Less than the average person. So when I want to know whether or not a movie is good, I need an opinion leader. Usually an opinion leader is the leader of several people. For example, Freddie Fillers is my go-to movie guy, a.k.a. opinion leader. But I'm sure there are plenty of other people, ones that I know and ones that I don't, who consider him, whether consciously or not, to be their opinion leader on the subject as well.
Having an opinion leader for things is intuitive. We don't have time to become experts at everything. It seems necessary that I rely on Joe for knowledge about ferrets, and Luke about firefighting, in order that I don't lose my expertise in another category.
On the other hand, having an opinion leader for everything is counterintuitive, at least to me. And this is what upsets me. I see people who do this. They go through life relying on other people's opinions for nearly everything. First of all, how is this living? Ok, that might be a little harsh. But putting your entire web of belief into a network of opinion leaders seems silly, some kind of form of cognitive suicide. Not to mention--opinion leaders are just as fallible as you and me (because, after all, they are you and me). Blind faith in an opinion leader is just dumb. Which is the reason why deciding an opinion leader should be done consciously when possible, because otherwise we could find ourselves listening to someone like Bill O'Reilly or Kevin Trudeau.
The bigger problem here is the giving up of belief-control, subconsciously, to a large group of fallible opinion leaders. And this is the thing I see happening to people I know, and this is what disappoints me. Opinion leaders are a necessary evil. Relying on only them is the bigger problem.
The solution to the bigger problem is to bring your fields of expertise to a conscious level and deciding what things you only trust yourself to form an opinion on. One thing I think everyone ought to become their own opinion leaders of is ethics. This would do a serious blow to harmful and useless social norms. As far as other areas, I would say religion would be pretty huge. Being of a certain religious belief because you were raised a certain way seems like an extremely arbitrary way of deciding your foundational metaphysical beliefs. Other areas of importance are up to you, but it seems like the smartest thing to do would be to become your own opinion leader on as many topics as possible to research.
Which brings me to my final point. The entire need for opinion leaders is that we don't have time to do the necessary research to make an educated decision about everything. So, giving up opinion leaders must come at the price of doing research and thinking about the subjects you have decided to take belief-control of. I am not advocating that people just arbitrarily decide something for each subject and then tenaciously cling to it. Time and thought is necessary as well!
But it seems very worth the research to take back control of one's own opinions, doesn't it?