The issue is freedom of expression. If individuals are allowed to speak, write and disseminate information and opinion freely and own businesses, why can't they charge for it? Well, that's a news organisation. It's not that you necessarily trust any one individual publisher, it's that a range of views are freely represented in the press generally.

The Chinese constitution used to guarantee free speech, but the massive disconnect between what the constitution said and what was actually allowed was so gargantuan it became a bit of an embarrassment in the post-Tiananmen era. Since then the constitution has been revised extensively to be less blatantly contrary to reality.

Totally incidental aside, but one of the inciting incidents for constitutional revision was a court case brought by a person fired from their job for being short, where the actual job had no real requirement for them being any particular height. They won the case based on the constitution's barring discrimination, but the fact that a court had granted a right to someone based on the constitution was so novel and unheard of that it caused massive conniptions in the CCP.

Google writes PR pieces. I don't see why you should trust news articles more than PR pieces, except as links to other sources that you can check yourself like scientific articles or government agencies with data.

> The issue is freedom of expression. If individuals are allowed to speak, write and disseminate information and opinion freely and own businesses, why can't they charge for it?

You can make legally protected news organizations, and that anyone who doesn't follow those rules isn't allowed to call themselves a news site with journalists. Instead they'd be forced to call themselves opinion writers or bloggers. That way you still have the freedom of expression but lets the public clearly see who follows the basic rules of independent reporting.

No, that's a publisher. "News" describes the product, not the method of operation. Has the war on words been so successful that Americans univerally consider e.g. Cosmo "news" now?

And it doesn't really answer a lot of the hard questions. Who is going to actually write the articles, what's their political angle, and what are their career objectives? And how do you handle delicate topics with evolving information in a neutral way?

Subscriber owned, i.e. subscribing involves buying a voting share in the enterprise. Endowed. Donor-driven is just one among many non-profit models.

Also, PBS has a variety of content and I don't think I know anyone who watches their news. Scarcely any of their content, but they have a few good things. I don't think they are taken very seriously as a news organization -- much less than NPR, for instance.

Yes, they get government funding and have a public mission. But they also aren't entirely funded by tax dollars.

I do think they have a weird bias that they are very oblivious to, but I don't think it's exactly a pro-government bias. It seems more like a don't-be-controversial bias where the goalpost for that keeps shifting.

Create one "donations to non-profit news" bucket, that people could freely contribute to (with tax advantages, like the election fund).

Then apportion that money out to all non-profit news organizations, according to some (readership) + (journalistic awards by their peers) weighting.

It removes the direct connection between donor and output, which is what we seem to want in news.

In terms of journalistic ethics, non-profit is somewhat better but by design isn't necessarily free of the same crockery that occurs in for-profit news. Non-profits are more likely to get people who take journalistic ethic seriously, but non-profit orgs are also seen as career leap-pads to the big name for-profit outlets, thus you end up with a lot of the same people and similar practices that end up at places like WaPo.

I don't know what the answer is to news, but I'm pessimistic that present models of non-profit news are the solution some believe them to be.

> I wonder why [...] articles written by for-profit organizations are as trusted as they are.

That's like asking "why do people believe propaganda?" The entire business model is built on creating the perception that they are authoritative when they may be nothing but lackeys playing dress-up. Sadly, the average person receives a generally poor education and is never taught about human psychology and how programmable the human brain is, and many of the messages they've received about the world came from parents whose views were shaped by a world that didn't have the internet in its current form. You could place the truth in front of them and it's a mixed bag as to whether they take that information and form an original opinion. But if you dress that information in a suit and tie, perhaps with the right letter and color next to their name, they become conditioned to accept that information from a place of subordinance.

EDIT: I want to clarify that I don't actually like shitting on public media. There was a lot that I learned during my time in it, there are some fantastic journalists in that arena, and overall I want to be believe in the concept. I've been highly critical of just about every single organization I've ever been affiliated with, so my intent isn't to single them out.

A not for profit newspaper could easily have a backer with other motivations, where they might be willing to sacrifice accuracy to push a particular agenda.

I am not sure that the problem is the news. I do not think people really care if they get accurate news.

Evidently not. When was the last time a mainstream news organization got heat from its own viewer base because of inaccurate reporting? I mean, it's fun to dunk on fox news because you think they're obviously spewing lies or whatever, but that doesn't really matter unless their viewership actually cares. Meanwhile outrage drives clicks, so journalists are strongly incentivized to stretch the truth.

Even assuming all leads were pursued equally, and all stories were published, entertainment is still highly partisan.

Which, presumably, is why we saw partisanship jump when the entertainment component increased in revenue importance (90s talk radio, then 2000s competitive 24/7 news).

Fox News was objectively brilliant in that they saw this coming, which is why they went ahead and devoted a huge chunk of their airtime to entertainment-weighted programming.

In any case, the eyeballs are the product. The advertisers are increasingly the true customers of media outlets. They don't even theoretically care about accuracy.

I pay monthly donations to Democracy Now, PBS, and Matt Taibbi. For my tastes, I very much prefer these sources rather than MSNBC or Fox News, which I dislike (one reason is that they never seem to walk back major stories that we eventually find out that they initially got wrong - that seems either unprofessional or corrupt, or maybe both).

A true facts only news outlet is likely best, but provides little entertainment value.

Seems centrist according to AllSides, but in my experience is has been Center-Left to Left.

Shouldn’t news be parcelled like AT&T and centralization systematically unweeded, for it is far more dangerous than centralization in energy or internet providers. Then, when there are thousands of small information providers, we can see bottom-up what actually interests people, rather than beating up an idea from the top-down until people think it’s interesting.

And the media is a strange place. Something like Joe Rogan's podcast is realistically more mainstream and probably more trusted than most news programs. There will be many examples like that.

[0] https://news.gallup.com/poll/195542/americans-trust-mass-med...

How can you "trust" a podcast that just interviews everyone and takes them at face value? Do people seriously go "yeah I heard it on joe rogan so I think it's probably true"?

Obviously any thinking individual will know Joe Rogan is worse at some of these aspects than mainstream media but they also recognize that mainstream media will willfully consistently violate other domains where Joe Rogan won't.

I trust Joe Rogan will tell me some stupid stuff about conspiracies and extra dimensionality trips, but I also trust that he won't tell me this stuff just to sell me on sponsors or his party's agenda, unlike the mainstream news.

The media companies don't have any special domain experience, they've got no clear idea if what they are reporting on is true or not.