We need a basic event log. Hard cold events, timestamped.
Every vote a politician makes on every issue. Every murder. Every time a mass shooting happens. Every time oil spills. Every time Boeing loses a chunk of its hull. Every time Boeing then lobbies for some self-serving favor. Every time a rocket is fired. Every time an incursion is detected.
Make it filterable. Searchable. Etc.
Journalists are biased though, like any human, but I don't see how it can be fixed. Even an AI digesting the events will have some bias, though it might be aware of much more things than a simple humain brain.
A raw event log is definitely useful tool in the toolbox, allow people who interested to perform deep level analysis.
To engage with different generations, we need different tools that engage with them and yet provide verifiable information.
Cable news outlets like Fox News and MSNBC as well as their online competitors serve as propaganda wings of the political parties in general and typically the most corrupt wing of that political party in particular. They misinform their audience on purpose to create hyper-partisan voters who hate the other party and reliably vote for the donkey or the elephant no matter how unqualified, corrupt or unhinged the candidate may be.
We would likely be much better off if the people who base their identity on hating the other political party or who worship specific politicians would find a different hobby because the news was "boring" to them. If having tons of poorly informed or outright misinformed "vote {party} no matter who" voters participating in the political process wasn't to the benefit of large corporate interests, there wouldn't be an enormous corporate media industry intent on making sure they vote and telling them who to vote for.
1. The event log -- in many places, this still doesn't exist in digital, structured, usable format. It's gotten better, but there's still a ways to go
2. Referencing the underlying event log -- there needs to be interpretation, summarization, and commentary, for the average viewer/reader. However, all of that should come with a reference to the underlying event log
We've gotten to the place we've gotten because (1) is impenetrable to the average person (or non-existent) and (2) doesn't happen.
Consequently, a bag of words has become more and more confused with facts.
We've had hyperlink technology for a while, journalism needs to fucking use it. :/
Hey Google, how much worse is everything this year?
According to Eventscore.com, national despair increased by 34.2%, a slight uptick compared to last year. School shootings have proceeded as expected, political corruption is within norms, and economic marginalization has followed modeled trends. Climate change and wars continue, planes are falling apart again, the courts made bad decisions, protestors are angry. But a new VR headset is coming out soon and a sportsball team somewhere won a game. Happy new year! Your next update is in 2025.
Sometimes things need to be explained. Now, long-winded magazine articles that exist for the writer to show off the virtuosity of their prose? That's niche for people who enjoy those things.
But otherwise raw brute-force data encourages raw brute-force policy.
For example, data point of prevailing home prices indicates a problem - that housing has gotten very expensive. Dumb brute-force policy = price caps. Analysis explains that houses are expensive because of supply and demand and the supply has plummeted while demand is rising, and that price caps would make that worse. Where does that connection live in your event-log?
All of that's journalism work, which we could all do ourselves, of course, but that takes a hell of a lot of time and most people are pretty bad at that kind of thing (though, granted, so are plenty of journalists—regardless, the work is journalism).