A possible solution to the dumming down of US news

In the US, polarization has completely ruined the credibity of the newsmedia. People do not consider arguments if they come from people they do not like. In short, arguments are not valued on their own merit.

So, i came up with a completely hypothetical and fantastical solution to the problem. I call it ensuring horizontal movement of factually based arguments.

It involves two measures:
First, you issue a certificate to certain newsmedia of any political persuasion that manage to produce articles with a proven factual basis. For the conservatives, that might be the wall street journal and for the liberals the new york times.

Then you make a condition stating that any newsmedia with a circulation or marketshare exceeding a certain threshold, must include one of these certfied syndicates in their news stream. So, if the New York post produces fantastical allegations about pizza gate, they must also distribute factual opinion pieces or articles from the Wall Street Journal, or any other certfied syndicator they prefer.

Certfications are not issued according to political views, but according to how factual articles are and how much effort that is put into checking facts. Tabloids must then include more serious articles, and thus subject their readers to sanity. But they can still produce crap themselves. And they can select their prefered syndicator.

What do yo think about this theoretical measure to compbat q-anon and the dumming down of the media?

(edited 1 month ago)

Reply 1

StriderHort

I kind of get you, but I think you're glossing over the fact that these things are owned by other people who will object and indeed probably scream bloody murder about press freedom if you try ordering them to run articles from other papers or attack their integrity.

Oversight would need to be government backed and legislated, which would likely be interpreted as massive state interference (and bear in mind that our government is pretty corrupt and directly involved with a lot of this BS media ie GB News)

Reply 2

Napp

Simply put who issues said certificate and why would anyone trust it? If anything it would likely be viewed as little more than the badge of a quisling considering anything government related is not trusted these days.

US media is awful but conversely it represents the political views of the populace, which do you try to fix first?