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News Media Reform

Here are my proposals to get journalistic integrity back into news reporting:

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1)  Any form of media (e.g. video, virtual, printed, TV) that has "News" in its name (whether a cable/TV channel or program, website, or print) will be required to be licensed in order for it to continue to advertise itself as "News."  The licensing process (admittedly TBD) will include requirements for (and proof of) compliance with a set of basic journalistic standards that include:

  • reporting only verified and vetted facts about events;

  • conducting interviews only with persons who have relevant factual information to share about the events (i.e. not consultants sharing opinions, gossip, or speculation about events);

  • adhering to a common TBD standard when an event can be considered and advertised as "Breaking News";

  • allowing the sharing and discussion of opinions, gossip, and speculation but only outside of the "News" portion of the program with such sessions being clearly caveated as opinion, gossip, and speculation;

  • requiring cable channels who want to maintain "News" in their name to meet some minimum amount of air time (e.g. 85%) that is exclusively devoted to reporting factual News.

  • ​requiring "news" organizations, that discover they reported information in error, to give the same amount of publicity to the corrected information as they did to the erroneous reporting so as to reach as many of the originally misinformed viewers/readers as possible.  For example, for print media that had a front page headline in error, the correction will be required to be a new front page headline in the same size and style font, and not in some tiny "Corrections" section on page 27 buried beneath the ad of someone trying to sell used socks.  As an example for cable "news" channels, should they discover errors of fact in a top story that was repeated every hour on the hour for 24 hours, then the correction will likewise have to be repeated every hour on the hour for 24 hours.

 

2)  I have no desire to censor or restrict free speech, but do not believe that free speech includes the right to lie and the right to spread or facilitate the spreading of knowingly inflammatory and harmful conspiracy theories that have been proven false.  Those media personalities who do, need to be held accountable.  In this vein, my goal is to make it easier for commentators and companies to be sued for knowingly spreading lies that have caused their viewers/listeners actual harm.  For example, many Americans refused to get the COVID vaccine because of the falsehoods and verifiably fabricated "scientific evidence" of the grave dangers of the vaccine perpetuated by commentators and companies with purely political and financial motivations.  I believe that the families of those who died (or suffered debilitating effects) from COVID because they remained unvaccinated due to these fallacies, should be able to sue those commentators and companies for wrongful death (or pain and suffering).

 

3)  We need to better teach our children how to think critically.  One place to start is for educators to teach regular lessons on how to distinguish facts from gossip, opinion, speculation, and outright lies.  One idea that I think would be a very interesting experiment is to have students take random "News" stories from the Internet, printed media, or elsewhere and highlight in different colors the parts of the "News" story that actually communicate factual information versus all of the other categories.  I'm sure it would be quite enlightening to see the results posted online.

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4)  But quite frankly, the real problem is with you, my fellow Americans, who insist on listening to 24/7 cable nonsense and talking heads who have isolated you into cliques of like-minded groups who do nothing but reinforce your skewed perceptions of reality with their politically and financially motivated propaganda.  If you really want things to change YOU need to turn these programs off, put your phones away, and get out and talk to people face-to-face—people who don't look like you and don't think like you!  If you do that, then just maybe you will have a better understanding of the true human condition and be less likely to fear, disparage, and harm one another.  You have the power!

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