The US no longer has a market of well-funded, professional sources of journalism. (Of the kind and scale that existed before ~2010)
It has for-profit partisan outlets and social media, and those are insufficient substitutes to power a democracy.
There were plenty of alternatives to TikTok to get information that was more credible than a Chinese own media company.
Look at NYT revenue [0], and it's the largest and most solvent of the big papers left. Newsrooms of everything after it (WSJ, WP, LAT) are even more gutted.
24/7 news channel "journalism" isn't a substitute, even when you can find it between the filler shows.
And it takes money to fund high quality journalism. Facebook and Google hijacked those funding streams, but then didn't use those profits to fund an actual replacement.
Instead, their platforms (and the ones that came after them) reward attention algorithm hacking and race-to-the-bottom in content quality.
And now, they've decided that even funding a fact checking function is inconvenient to their bottom line, so ditched that responsibility as soon as the political winds allowed them to.
[0] https://m.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NYT/new-york-times/r...
The population doesn’t want to be “educated”. They knew exactly what they were getting. How do you “educate” people who in their heart believes that for instance saving Israel will bring on the second coming of Jesus during the rapture and if they condone the “gay lifestyle” they are going to burn for eternity and the nation will be set on fire?