Like the BBC? Which is abused roundly by everyone (so about as neutral as humanly possible)
There's no real solution. In the end news firms are bought by businesses as they struggle to survive.
Businesses need profit, so those firms end up giving ground to the necessities of survival. All the firms you see today are the survivors.
The firms which don't deal in interesting stuff, don't carry much weight in the mainstream since they aren't "communicating to their core audience." And are left for those few people who have the time, patience and willingness to dig through what is today considered "long form" journalism.
These firms are in turn targeted by those vested interests who still need the facts massaged. (Cut funding! It's Biased against X groups! It follows a liberal agenda! It's conservative!)
This leads to the final 3 points.
1) a fair media is a source of power. The powerful politically minded will always vie for control or work to discredit it
2) mainstream media will continue to be a lost cause, and actual discussion of facts will be done in specialist and scientific journals. Nothing will survive the vortex of money and power.
3) fact checking is now dependent on the moral and intellectual fiber of the reader. Those people who cultivate open minds and self doubt will be the few who make the effort to know the world. (To what end though, you try to communicate and it will be lost in the vortex)
Make civics a mandatory part of K-12 curriculum. Include exercises where one sifts historical yellow journalism from real news. Democracy won't survive if we try to patch over citizens' lack of critical thinking.
It's also painfully apparent when "educating children On X" is applied.
Most kids don't pick it up, and it's just an additional burden on them.
I come from a country where this is precisely the situation and it has 0 impact, except it is yet another avenue for children to practice their rote learning skills.
I find that The average American is far more informed about the operation of his legislature than is the average Indian.
The other issue is that it tosses the problem to the next generation to solve. But that won't work - the next generation will be even worse of than ours when it comes to infowars.
The idea that a journalist at the WSJ or NYT is in any way influenced by your nebulous "necessities of survival" (the advertisers, I'm guessing?) is simplistic and false. Most of them would actually love to be asked just so they could never stop telling the story how they threw that manager out of their office.
>1) a fair media is a source of power. The powerful politically minded will always vie for control or work to discredit it
So how do we make the power-minded compete against each-other to pay to control or discredit the fair media, thus giving the media itself an incentive to check the power of the powerful?
No clue. Yours is a pretty efficient idea but the powerful work aren't idiots.
The power minded are already competing to control the message, hence Fox News vs CNN etc. in America and similar parallels in the rest of the world.
Speak power to power i suppose. Someone has to intelligently take the fight to them, and it has to be executed and planned at a higher level and with a broader more practical humanitarian vision than what someone in an HN forum could bring to bear.
> ... specialist and scientific journals. Nothing will survive the vortex of money and power.
You should be wary of the cognitive dissonance being displayed here. What makes scientific journals immune to the corrupting influence of money? Is it perhaps just that you've up to now had no reason to dislike the political agenda found therein?
Here, let me finish that comment for you: "Gotcha! You don't read this one specific (if very prestigious) journal I can name and aren't familiar with its particular foibles, so you must not be able to provide any evidence for your claim!"
Actually, there's really only one big politicized issue in the natural sciences, not counting ethical concerns in biology (I'll let you figure out what it is on your own). This is unsurprising given that it's much harder to twist the facts to suit a narrative.
The social sciences, on the other hand, are full of politics. I don't have links handy, but X% of researchers in some social sciences openly admit to political discrimination in hiring decisions, for some large X.
There's no real solution. In the end news firms are bought by businesses as they struggle to survive.
Businesses need profit, so those firms end up giving ground to the necessities of survival. All the firms you see today are the survivors.
The firms which don't deal in interesting stuff, don't carry much weight in the mainstream since they aren't "communicating to their core audience." And are left for those few people who have the time, patience and willingness to dig through what is today considered "long form" journalism.
These firms are in turn targeted by those vested interests who still need the facts massaged. (Cut funding! It's Biased against X groups! It follows a liberal agenda! It's conservative!)
This leads to the final 3 points.
1) a fair media is a source of power. The powerful politically minded will always vie for control or work to discredit it
2) mainstream media will continue to be a lost cause, and actual discussion of facts will be done in specialist and scientific journals. Nothing will survive the vortex of money and power.
3) fact checking is now dependent on the moral and intellectual fiber of the reader. Those people who cultivate open minds and self doubt will be the few who make the effort to know the world. (To what end though, you try to communicate and it will be lost in the vortex)