> we fill the spectrum from terrible to award winning; at least we can choose.
and that's why there's apathy, because you cannot easily tell the difference between award winning and terrible (when the desire isn't to tell the truth, but instead manipulate the public opinion).
If only there's a way for the reputation of a new source to be tarnished for reporting badly...
I understand your complaint but this ship has sailed long ago; a corollary of modern communication and access to information online is that now anybody with an agenda can publish it. The old model of set gatekeepers and Walter Cronkite delivering the trusted news isn't really possible at the moment since we're flooded with information. There are more information sources than one can possibly sort through and you can spend your life in a bubble without realizing it anymore since you can't tell where news came from, who made it, who sponsored it, and so on. You can curate your own news flood, and people happily do to ensure it only has defeatable opposing views and the rest is just reaffirming. We gave up on mainstream media and for some reason decided that rants on YouTube, walls of text on Reddit, and tweets were better.
Actually come to think of it, this might be a really good idea for a distributed ledger for the Associated Press - let whoever report whatever with the AP block chain, but require that the entire "transaction chain" or chain of custody is published with each bit. Make it clear what came from where and how it forked.
and that's why there's apathy, because you cannot easily tell the difference between award winning and terrible (when the desire isn't to tell the truth, but instead manipulate the public opinion).
If only there's a way for the reputation of a new source to be tarnished for reporting badly...