There used to be a job called "consumer reporter" at most major media outlets. Their job was to take stories like this, do a little research, and try to present a somewhat balanced story for the rest of us to consume.
There also was a Better Business Bureau, which had a job to take all kinds of disputes like this and serve as a "memory" for the public.
As far as I know, these mostly-local institutions do not exist in analogue at web scale.
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)
We need a proactive and inquisitive press that questions PR and asks these companies to clarify why they say what they say. Our current media simply reports “In a statement, Company X said Y” and leaves it at that.
Do you have any solutions? It’s clearly evident that most of the public wants and pays for sensationalism and bias rather than facts, hence as a business, it’s not viable to provide objective truths.
It’s easy to blame “the media”. It’s harder to look at ourselves, relatives, friends, neighbors, and community and say we haven’t really done anything to incentivize good sources of information to exist.
We pay nothing for quality journalism and expect everything. I’m actually impressed with what we do have at least for now.
Once upon a time, ombudsman and journalist associations, and competitors. These days, those tend to all be the same, if they exist at all and aren't deemed "propaganda" or "fake news" or "disinformation" or similar.
The news reporter doesn't tell you what to think, they do the research - talk to competitors' CEOs, talk to independent experts, bring up that lawsuit and interview leading attorneys in the field, research prior comments and actions, ask followup questions to the CEO of the corporation who issued the press release, etc etc - and then share it with you.
No one has time to do that themself, and the CEOs, attorneys, experts, etc. won't return your calls anyway (they can't return everyone's calls).
Opinion writers are the one who tell you what to think. IMHO, few of them are better than blogger.
I think there is, but for the past 30(?) years or so editorials have masked themselves as journalists. Hence why we get "well it was on Fox News/CNN so it must be true". Digging that market out of the ashes will be a tremendous feat and I applaud anyone who even attempts to do it in an honest way.
That doesn't cut it for me. Media organizations ought to be doing their own reporting, and where they don't they need to be going with reputable organizations with standards and procedures in place to keep this kind of thing from happening.
So if I want a news outlet to pay more attention to a particular issue, the solution is to do the reporting myself and serve it up to them on a silver platter? Maybe that's true, but it hardly seems practical in general, nor does it answer the OP's question...
IMO the demise of modern journalism presents an absolutely enormous opportunity for the few people with the right skills: If this is even close to true (66% of corp fraud undetected) imagine if you could get even a couple researchers to detect more of it using publicly available information. Set up a massive short position on that company and fire off press releases on a slow Newsday to share what you found with the public. I actually knew some professional researchers and talked to them about this once. I'm too lazy to actually put it together but pretty sure it's a viable idea.
I would like the ability of pointing out journalistic bias in other media so customers stop listening to them, and this requires source materials to compare to the way the article is written. Our problem is not how we consume media, but how others do; Enabling a sane discussion to highlight that the article misinterpreted the source is part of the discussion. As long as we live in the same voting space, I want entry points to criticize their articles.
I think investigative journalism nonprofits like ProPublica are the best point of leverage for this problem. Big newspapers like the Washington Post & NY Times do good investigative work too, but pair it with lots of duplicate stories.
I'd like to imagine there's some way for society to recover to the state of semi-trusted media, maybe we just need to have enough voices that the truth comes out in majority - like industry run newspapers, the cotton lobby's paper is clearly biased on this article about reducing fabric tariff's from mexico but the jeweler's quarterly newspaper doesn't have a vested interest.
As I said, it's a hard problem. I like the discussion on trying to find an answer though!
I see what you mean. Some actual reporting on this would be welcome. It is rare to get actual reporting these days, like looking into the overall shoplifting statistics in a serious way, instead of just printing what someone said in a press release or earnings call. Journalism is not what we'd like.
I still think it's news to report when a Walgreen's exec says in an earnings call "Yeah, maybe shoplifting wasn't actually that bad and we over-reacted", when the shoplifting issue, at Walgreen's specifically, has become such a talking point to represent the overall situation. Even just on it's own, I think it's news, and don't think it's just propaganda to report it in the way NYT did.
But I get what you mean, I agree that I wish more people more often were interested in getting to what's really going on, instead of just finding talking points to support whatever they believe or find convenient for their agenda.
I think "Oh, that Walgreens situation was not, according to Walgreens, what people are saying it was" is one point that is not irrelevant in doing that though. But yeah, it's not the full picture, it's just one data point (or, anyway, removing one data point from the previous picture).
Specifically, several decades ago in the U.S., there were laws mandating fair news in exchange for some type of compensation - I'm not sure of the specifics though. If anybody would be so kind as to shed light on that.
Erm, the traditional journalism buisness knows ads as well. And there are countless examples of articles being stopped investigating/published, because the main add customer objected and threatened to leave
Or when it so happens, that the boss of the media concern is a golfclub buddy of the senator who is accused of something.
There also was a Better Business Bureau, which had a job to take all kinds of disputes like this and serve as a "memory" for the public.
As far as I know, these mostly-local institutions do not exist in analogue at web scale.
We need them.
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