Something's gotta give. Right now, it's all hard about narrative. It's not information, it's all shaping and characterization these days. Of course Trump doesn't help the cause, but to watch the news contort itself in an effort to "counter" has lead to its demise as a semi trusted fourth estate.
[1]money.cnn.com/2018/05/23/technology/elon-musk-media/index.html
Not sure resurrecting Pravda is the best way to ascertain the veracity of facts with authority. Pravda was a joke.
That said, the unfortunate reality is that ALL of these proposals are predicated on trust. Do you trust whatever news source you are consuming? Do you trust whatever news source rating platform you are consuming? Etc etc.
Nowadays, it's probably best just to accept that every article or comment you see on the internet is possibly part of a well tuned professional manipulation campaign. This goes DOUBLY for any article or comment that is even remotely political. Including this comment, your comment, and every other comment on this thread.
That's just the nature of the world in which we currently live. A sad reality is that, in the end, we'll all be effectively choosing the sources, the data and the stories we wish to believe. And those choices will be largely informed by our pre-existing biases.
From the reaction from some journos, it's clear some don't like the idea being accountable for their reporting.
Why? Surely what you'll actually get is one political faction dominating [parts of] the site and doing their utmost to downvote anything that contradicts their worldview to oblivion and (to a somewhat lesser extent) upvote probably false stuff that happens to support it. It's very much a winner-takes-all battle, because people that just want to read stuff or fact check aren't going to stick around if it obviously skews alt-right or far-left, and probably not even if it has an allegiance to one relatively moderate political coalition or another. If you want to know what a particular faction thinks are the important news stories of the day it probably has a subreddit anyway. The alternative to winner-takes-all is top-down curation, which is basically what the media does anyway, usually being more open about their partisanship, and I'm not sure write less unfavourable stuff about Elon Musk companies is the best starting point for curation.
And if your site is started with the premise that the media cannot be trusted, there's a good chance the people that choose to spend most of their time there will be those with even less regard for truth and objectivity. (Case in point: As soon as Elon posted about "who owns the press", his timeline became dominated by people arguing that he meant "the Jews" who certainly had the numbers to drown out any useful observations Elon might actually have wanted make on the subject)
Just today, we had someone from the NYT RT a picture of illegal immigrants during the Obama admin and pinned it on Trump --when people called it out, he re-framed the issue. Of course with Musk it's about misrepresenting statistics and making mountain out of mole hills from minor production issues. Then there is the whole aspect of using a small unverified studies to call for one type of action or another in favor of one group or another. News have become something akin to a rumour mill and echo chamber than an organ which diffuses unframed news.
See also: Todd & Claire.
How would a news ratings agency tell you that?
The only thing ratings agencies tell you, is how the public voted on news agencies. (Or if the ratings agencies don't allow the public to vote, then the only thing they tell you is what THEY feel is "true".)
Either way, they are no more worthy of our trust than the media outlets they purport to be "rating".
It's EXTREMELY likely that they'll be just another cog in the machinery of professional manipulation campaigns. (For all we know, it's likely a professional manipulation campaign that wants to start the "ratings agency" in the first place.) That's just the reality of the world we live in right now. You just have to be skeptical of everything you see like that.
As a global society we are starting to come to self-awareness, and confronting the need to distinguish between hallucinations and real sensory inputs. [1] We're in the situation of a person who has suddenly woken up after falling asleep while driving on the freeway. We have to clear away the cobwebs and dreamstuff, but quick, and get back in our lane and out of the way of that oncoming semi-truck.
The global AI is already here, and it has people for neurons. Katsuhiro Yoneshige's service functions like a close-to-primary-perception locus of attention, compared to most news services which are more like idle daydreams.
In this memetic evolutionary system, there's about to be a strong selective pressure towards fidelity in communications. (Cf. Musk's Pravda thrust.)
[1] "Anatomy of an online misinformation network" (plos.org) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17173593 This is on Public Library of Science analyzing what, in psychological terms , could be considered a neurosis in the global human psyche.
I ask myself this sometimes.
NPR kind of exists off this mystique, although they are not neural, though many of their listeners believe that, they are closer to being neutral on at least some issues than many other sources. Some of their reporters are at least fair (@nrpgreene) although their ombudsman gets complaints from the left that NPR _leans_ _right!_ while most neutral people would tell you they are left _leaning_.