The purpose of journalism is to provide citizens with information they need to make the best possible decisions about their lives, their communities, their societies, and their governments. Its practices should be based a systematic process of verification aimed at finding not just the facts, but also the “truth about the facts.” (American Press Institute)
“Truth about the facts” is something in accord with what actually happened, how it happened, and why it happened.
The role of the press/journalists is to hold leaders in society (political, business, religious, and so on) accountable by challenging their positions based on verifiable facts.
For many decades, the public has received news, the product of journalism, vis the print, radio, and television. The economic model for the support of journalism has shifted resulting in the decline of print journalism and the emergence of news as entertainment and even propaganda.
Suggestions:
1. Find a way to create an independent funding mechanism such as a foundation that would be large enough to fund independent journalism and journalistic projects to serve the public good. Potential journalists would send in research proposals and via an independent board consisting perhaps mainly of other current and retired journalists receive grants large enough to fund their projects and their livelihood during their research. At the minimum such a foundation would fund investigative journalism to support the type of political check and balance alluded to in our Constitution.
2. Restore the Must Carry rules and the Fairness Doctrine to broadcast news and apply them equally to cable news networks.
3. Regulate ownership to eliminate corporate propaganda pretending to be “news” or “news reporting.” This could be done by enforcing antitrust laws to break up media conglomerates to bring back locally-owned newspapers, radio stations, and television stations. Congress should also bring back media ownership limits to where they were before being gutted in the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
4. Establish newspapers/online media entities own/run by foundations such as the Guardian or owned by publicly traded companies that limit ownership of shares to prevent control of information flow. (The case for ending private ownership of news media and banning hate speech)
5. Taking a cue from science and medicine the news industry could establish the a certification of “peer review” that offers a “Good Newskeeping Seal” to media outlets that subscribe to it in order to help news consumers know who’s most likely to be trustworthy and who’s most likely to be creating or repeating misinformation.
6. Avoid Legacy/Corporate Media (CBS, NBC, ABC, MSNBC, Fox Propaganda, NYT, Washington Post, Politico, Axios, Associated Press). Instead look into more legitimate news sources: ProPublica, Ground News, Mother Jones, ResistanceLive, The Bulwark, Occupy Democrats, MeidasTouch, Daily Kos, etc.
Finland is winning the war on fake news. What it’s learned may be crucial to Western democracy