Bound by whom? Where is this obligation written? Who holds them to it? What are the consequences if they break it?
Or more to the point: what consequences have they suffered for the fact that they have already broken this obligation over and over again over the past decades?
1. The mainstream news sources have messed up lots of times. (I would argue that their success rate is very high, though)
2. The mainstream news are largely ad-supported and therefore their entire line of work is a bit of a minefield of conflicts of interest.
That said...
They are not perfect, but comparing them to a disinformation merchant like Alex Jones is an absolute farce.
Stories at "real" news organizations are vetted by multiple members of the staff. They make corrections. This cannot be said of wack jobs like Alex Jones. They are not even in the same league in terms of good-faith effort to get things right.
Bound by whom? Where is this obligation written?
Who holds them to it? What are the consequences
if they break it?
Two -- and perhaps more tangibly -- traditionally in mainstream media, reporters caught fabricating stories or otherwise being unethical essentially forfeited their careers.
You can see both of those factors at work in the story of Jayson Blair, a reporter who was caught fabricating stories for the NYT.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayson_Blair#Later_career
https://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/11/us/correcting-the-record-...
Yes, the NYT was duped. Embarrassingly. But the system worked. They conducted a pretty intense internal investigation to catch the guy. They caught him. They set the record straight. They admitted they screwed up. In that one instance they displayed more journalistic integrity than you'd see from Alex Jones in a lifetime.
And what happened to Jayson Blair? As I said above, his journalism career was over.
You can point out problems with "traditional" news organizations, and I'll agree with many of them, and they are still miles better than conspiracy hacks with zero journalistic scruples.
Respectable news reporting organizations are bound by an obligation to research and vet their stories.
People like Alex Jones are not, and they can look 95% as slickly presented as a "real" news organization for 1% of the cost and 0% of the moral obligations. They can churn this stuff out at a rate that sources of respectable reporting cannot even begin to approach.
It's like the information equivalent of a DDOS attack, or the "Gish Gallop."
Give the Alex Joneses of the world an equal platform and the world will eventually be nothing but Alex Joneses -- whoever screams the most sensational stuff the most often is going to win.
I agree with the terribleness of this.But I do truly believe it's less terrible than giving a platform to bad-faith creeps like Jones.
Ultimately, the answer is an educated populace with strong critical thinking skills that can do a better job of deciding for themselves. That is truly the goal.
I'll let you decide how feasible that is in the short term, the long term, or any term whatsoever.
20-30 years ago we all thought the WWW was going to be this incredible marketplace of ideas where the truth would win. What an idealistic crock of shit that was.