This seems like a tough nut to crack - not sure how we'd hold people accountable for their journalistic malpractice.
Advertising is really just bribes for positive press.
IMO the news sources we have are as good as it will ever get. Maybe we can enact some legislation about advertising, since we all know there are privacy issues around it as well, but at the end of the day we just need people to evolve in the information age. To understand that our attention is valuable, and it's important to be able to distinguish what is worth our attention. We're in for some rough years until we figure that out as a species.
Go to substack and find someone you trust.
I like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald, but YMMV.
Also, check out Congressional Dish. She reads legislation and reports.
> Anything can be bankrolled under the table by anyone, and you'll never know.
Sure, but should we take the possibility of mixed compromised interests as a reason to stick to the known compromised?
Government media sources will have interests counter to your own. Large corporate media sources as well. Advertiser funded sources must not report negatively of their cash cows. I'll not be getting my information from sources like these
Again, I don't see the difference. I think compromised news is the best we can hope for, and we just need to get better at living with it.
Of course that won't happen, most of these corporations are just mouth pieces for politicians, and they like to keep them around.
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/a-court-ruled-rachel-maddow...
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/29/917747123/you-literally-cant-...
The problem is when journalists/scientists cherry pick the information that helps their agenda/hypothesis and downplay the rest. That's unscientific. But that's why we need multiple journalists working the same topic, i.e. replication. And we need a general population/peer review who is intelligent enough to spot biases.
But historically humans are just bad at spotting their own biases, and more often than not, "A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."