The days of going on social media looking for news are over, when people can quickly spin up fake articles with photos of some famous landmark on fire or in ruins it becomes too frustrating to discern between fact and fiction.
Until there are abrupt and justified consequences for lies and liars, we will swim in them like a flood.
1) For many people, myself included, the mainstream media's reputation is so extremely damaged that anything short of a full, complete, tear down and from scratch rebuild of the entire industry won't in the slightest bit convince me to even give them a second chance. I've already moved on.
2) Even if a network literally posts only verifiable true facts, even if they have a panel of 1000 scientists and 1000 experts and 1000 people of different political persuasions that all agree with each other that the printed facts are "true", the organization can still easily lie and manipulate the population by simply selectively choosing which stories to cover and which to ignore, depending on which stories benefit their ideologies or hurt their rival ideologoies. Just "telling the truth" isn't remotely enough, they need to be both politically and ideologically neutral, they need to cover all events impartially and equally.
A 100% accurate map of the territory is just the territory itself, and is useless as a map.
Too many already base their reports on social media, or user comments, or influencer bullshit. The damage is done.
I think there is opportunity here, but i don't think it's back to the old ways. I imagine it would be some hybrid. A news source which aggressively documents and details sources. All opinions backed by a paper trail, etcetc.
I'd pay for that. Or something.. but i don't know what that looks like. These days it feels like everything has an agenda, and nothing (at least that i've seen) backs up claims/opinions/supposed-facts with the data fueling the statement.