winber1 wrote:
Railey2 wrote:
For example by implementing laws that state that you aren't allowed to misrepresent political arguments on purpose to influence your readership in a certain way, etc.
Good luck on that. Whether or not you actually believe what you write, you are just as allowed to say to the public that you believe in what you write and they can't really do shit to you, as long as you are consistent with what you write. Especially in something so subjective, there is no golden rule for saying something is objectively misrepresenting political arguments. And if a law did manage to pass to allow the condemnation of "misrepresented data," then people can just be throwing that at anything that they didn't agree with.
the point is, it should not up to the people. It should be up to a third party organization that hopefully consists of unbiased, qualified people, who can tell the difference between fair coverage and blatant dishonesty.
There are many instances where news stations straight out lied about the facts. Take for example climate change, or creationism. As soon as you call yourself a news agency, or seek to fulfill the same function under a different name, you should under no circumstance be allowed to lie about clear facts.
Now this sounds pretty radical, so let's put it a different way:
There are two extremes.
1) People just say whatever they want. We have creationism being taught in public schools, news stations just report whatever they like, some of them still try being honest but most just pander to their audience and feed them with the information they want to hear. Nobody is being held to a standard, facts don't matter, it's just everyone living in his own echo chamber.
2) A government that has all the tools to censor opinions on national TV and elsewhere, if they deem them unfitting. Even though the tools were meant to enforce something that may look like
this, it is easy to see how such power could be abused pretty quickly.
I believe that the the US is approaching the former in a frightening speed. People already talk about our days being a supposed "post-fact-era", and I believe there is a lot of truth in that, simply because nobody is holding the media to a standard.
Standards are important in journalism, they are immensely important, but currently there are no ramifications if you simply break every golden rule known to journalism. There needs to be an authority that can take the role of a governing instance, otherwise every country will slowly but surely approach the post-fact-era, just like the US is doing now.
And I bet you that this authority will not be the public. The public cares more about its own biases and indoctrinated beliefs than about facts and honest journalism, unless you make them care.
However, we can't have the second extreme either. Free speech is important, but so is the truth. There needs to be some sort of balance. I wouldn't know how exactly that balance can be achieved, I just know that it is very important to not arrive at either extreme.