I'd settle for a decent means of rewarding the good ones. There are plenty of great journalists who have paid a hefty price for doing their jobs properly. If there was a way to balance the social cost of being a real journalist by rewarding journalists when they do good work, that would go a long way to getting us the kind of journalism we would all like to see.

Don't accept news sources that ąre not user funded.

Advertising is really just bribes for positive press.

What are some examples of good user-funded investigative journalist sources? Because the obvious hole in this panacea is that it's literally impossible to know where the actual funding comes from. Anything can be bankrolled under the table by anyone, and you'll never know. In fact, small payments from viewers all over the world are even easier to launder than large sums.

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.

> What are some examples of good user-funded investigative journalist sources?

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

> Sure, but should we take the possibility of mixed compromised interests as a reason to stick to the known compromised?

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.

So when Fox and MSNBC gets sued for slander, they claim that it isn't news, it's entertainment. If we simply restrict the freedom of the press from any corporation that claims their news department is entertainment and not news (and therefore not press), that might solve some problems.

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-...

Freedom of the press applies to entertainment, too. And "simply restrict the freedom of the press" is a terrible solution to almost everything.

Yes, it was mostly in jest. I don't think freedom of the press covers entertainment, but freedom of speech certainly does. The only way to combat this stuff is to realize they're just peddlers of fear. Also, they're on cable so they can't be included in the fairness doctrine if we were to ever bring it back.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine