A fair point, but I don't think the concession is worth what you get out of it. A citizen whose sole news source is Fox is considerably less informed than a viewer who might watch exclusively CNN (or possibly even nothing at all, see [1])

Fox News really is worse, and while there may be lessons learned there which can be applied to the other outlets, such as insisting on clearer labeling of opinion content vs reporting, I think it's an all-lives-matter-style distraction to throw up our hands and say there's nothing that can be done and they're all equally bad because it's a problem inherent in the medium.

[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/study-watching-fox-news-make...

While I can technically see that some news organizations are worse than others, my issue is that they are all so bad that they are actively doing significant damage to the world and most of the time they are doing it consciously and intentionally, so I don't really get much utility trying to distinguish them from one another.

And yet while they are all genuinely terrible due to trying to remain profitable AND trying to advance their personal political agendas, people are always trying to use the excuse that "its better than X" to justify supporting them.

My solution would be to ignore the news completely, but that solution isn't effective because I know multiple people that insist on ranting about everything they see/hear from the media on a daily basis.

IMO the media is very important for civilization, but somehow we have accepted that deceit, manipulation, and failure are the golden standard.

And they're all funded by ads.

Between the need to access government figures for interview, and their funding sources, how could you ever expect straight forward reporting?

If you aren't paying for your media sources, you're the product.

> If you aren't paying for your media sources, you're the product.

Even if you are paying, you can still be the product, as long as media can make even more money out of it. I mean, why wouldn’t they? More money is more money.

In Sweden we have public service TV channels, but even in that context I think your advice holds up – not a good source for news. Too stressed, too shallow reporting.