I think journalism itself should go away in its present form (and in the form it has been for the past centuries). Because as it is today, it's held to ridiculously low standards.
I mean, consider how would you handle any kind of factual investigation that actually matters to you. Say your production server suddenly overloaded and died, and everyone in your company is trying to figure out what happened.
Would the search involve interviewing engineers and management, and then writing biased stories about their life and decisions? Would you treat "investigators inherently choose which facts to report" as an acceptable standard for their work?
No. You'd start with a fact database, you'd go on collecting every bit of related information, making it available to see and analyze, you'd gather conclusions and add things, mark some entries as "dead ends", etc. until the real cause reveals itself. Suddenly it's entirely possible to reach unbiased facts. I wish we created our news the same way.
Most reportage deals with those pesky humans, and not a "production server(that) suddenly overloaded and died," or with something that is similarly deterministic, in a forensic sense.
While one could certainly attempt to create a "fact database" about a busted server, trying to do the same about an event involving humans, each with their own undiscernable motivations and varying degrees of willful duplicity, is often impossible.
Instead you get stories about the life decisions and bias of the actors involved, because that's what a person who's been trained to tease out the facts from a myriad of fallible sources, any of whom may or may not be lying or trying to advance an unstated agenda, does.
Still not buying it. I don't feel like journalists are trained to tease out facts, they still tease out stories.
For pretty much any newsworthy event there are lots of facts that are concrete and objective, and frankly, that's what matters most of the time. Life decisions and motivations and biases make for a fun reading, but are otherwise irrelevant.
A politician said something, or did not. A company is going forward with a project, or is not. The proposed law implies a consequence X, or does not. Those are ground facts. I'm not saying they're always easy to establish, but the media sources are not even trying.
I recently stumbled upon an interesting site that tries to run Bayesian analysis on various pieces of information and media reports, to piece out the actual reality. See e.g.: https://www.rootclaim.com/claims/what-caused-the-chemical-ca... What I want to point out there is not their analysis in particular. Just how it's structured. It seems that establishing some objectively verifiable summary of a "messy" real-world story is not impossible.
I mean, consider how would you handle any kind of factual investigation that actually matters to you. Say your production server suddenly overloaded and died, and everyone in your company is trying to figure out what happened.
Would the search involve interviewing engineers and management, and then writing biased stories about their life and decisions? Would you treat "investigators inherently choose which facts to report" as an acceptable standard for their work?
No. You'd start with a fact database, you'd go on collecting every bit of related information, making it available to see and analyze, you'd gather conclusions and add things, mark some entries as "dead ends", etc. until the real cause reveals itself. Suddenly it's entirely possible to reach unbiased facts. I wish we created our news the same way.