The system does work fairly well. Screw-ups of investigations and scoops are big news because they're rare among serious journalistic outfits.
No individual journalist wants to be known for getting a story wrong, so incentives are pretty strong to begin with.
What would happen if we made that term (or synonyms like "journalism") protected advertising terms, so that you're required to either live up to it, or call yourself something else?
Another idea under this hypothetical law would be to have retractions/corrections carry the exact same amount of publicization as the original story. In other words, if you spend 10 minutes during primetime talking about something that turned out to be a lie, you get to spend 10 minutes on primetime about how you screwed up. You lie on a front page article that was up for a week? Your correction features in the same place for a week.
This is a labeling/marketing law, nothing more. You are not excempt from those by way of being a media organization. Certainly it is not a speech restriction. As a bonus, it would allow competitors to market on that label since now it actually means something.
There are also countless of "articles" in those (like the NYT, WaPo, WSJ) that are nothing more than a press release with some shallow context sprinkled in, without any independent verification or actual journalistic work.
This doesn't provide a risk of publishing false information ("we are just reporting on the press release"), but is often misleading and of little value to the reader.
At the minimum a list of sources with a link to the press release (and probably nothing/little else) would make it easy to see that a article is nothing more than a shill PR.
Since it happens so frequently, it should be easy to find one or two, maybe even for each publication.
I think in a lot of places this isn't nearly as true as maybe it once was. The top selling newspapers in the UK pretty much habitually print anything that drives sales / their agenda and when they get a slap on the wrist they just print a minimal viable retraction.
When that occasionally lands them in court they treat it basically as a cost of doing business.
Imho it perfectly contradicts the point, because the UK isn't alone with that issue, BILD is also a tabloid, the most circulated one in Germany.
Of course, a lot of that hinges with the definition of "tabloid" [0] and how different Overton windows for these societies. For example, both UK and German tabloids heavily relied on "Page X" girls for their popularity.
While the same in the US was it's very own niche with the Playboy, as selling sexuality that openly in the mainstream was always more controversial in the US compared to Europe.
But US outlets also ain't above sensationalized headlines and leaving out a bit of context to justify them, some would argue that's something the US actually championeered with the marketing industry.
It's the same with the public shaming and privacy of people; In Europe, that's considered a very tabloid thing to do, meanwhile, in the US it's often standard to show uncensored pictures of people with their full names.
Does that really help to surface the truth? Or is it merely just another manifestation of the flaws of the "free market" at work? If the market only wants what sells best, and not what's actually true, what's the most likely outcome?
[0] https://www.agilitypr.com/resources/top-media-outlets/top-15...
As for established publications; from their point of view they can probably manage fine because they have a good reputation already, but I think it would benefit society at large if they too got better at citing sources so that we can rely less on reputation alone.
Reputation is a proxy for trustworthiness, but greater source transparency allows for the trustworthiness of individual articles to be judged with less work and thus less time needed, which means that deliberately misleading articles, factually wrong information and honest mistakes can all be caught sooner.
>No individual journalist wants to be known for getting a story wrong, so incentives are pretty strong to begin with.
For some altruistic ones sure. However, for each one of those, there are 10 writing click-bait articles to generate traffic to questionable orgs and they don't care at all about being wrong.
It just proved that "journalists" weren't doing any research and were just scraping wikipedia. And getting paid to do it.
I remember when Michael Jackson died and channel Five here in the UK had a hastily arranged "Michael Jackson Special" with library shots telling his life story. The narration was word-for-word the Wikipedia article. Disgusting.
You still haven't refuted anything I wrote. Clickbait and low-effort articles are pervasive. Everyone knows that. But you can generally trust publications with known journalistic standards and a good record.