The correspondences revealed in Fox News court cases do not paint a picture of a company with their own principled view to having a positive impact, that included respect for facts.

All companies "serve" their customers, including news organizations, and inevitably have subjective ways of organizing their efforts.

But there is a big difference between ones that have a mission geared to a positive society outcome, a commitment to customer well being, and respect for facts, with profits following from that service, vs. a mission to print whatever they can legally afford to, to maximize profits. And of course, that difference is a continuum.

Some companies take value creation seriously. Others optimize for opportunities to extract value and prey on dysfunction.

They might believe it but anyone not engaging in motivated reasoning can see they aren't. But it just isn't reasonably possible to match up major news reporting with someone who sat down and asked "what reporting is important and helpful to the readers?" outside maybe financial journals. They're pretty obviously trying to gin up hate, fear and misunderstanding. The reporting on Trump alone during his presidency was jaw dropping, let alone all the low-level warmongering that threads through the corporate press.

My rule of thumb is to go read what any politician actually said, because I've only seen it reported accurately by a journalist in rare cases. That rule simply isn't something a productive reporting slant would require.

The only three things libertarians care about:

1) Taxation is theft

2) Legalize weed

3) The age of consent should be lower

yeah, the left/right dichotomy is gradually becoming outright meaningless - usually just sloppily slapped labels that fit an agenda. Important nuances go completely unnoticed in the left/right universe, like libertarians siding with communists, and neocons siding with democrats - or whoever thinks regime changing from above is a good idea. Anarchism, militarism, libertarianism, conservativism, fascism, welfarestateism, social democracy, etc, these are all useful terms. Left and right; not so much.

>The Left no longer means pushing for worker unionization or trying to expand welfare programs, at least not in the rich countries. [...] The Left is now a mostly academic movement dealing in obscure words.

This is as factual as rain is dry.

>This traditional left has become fringe almost everywhere in the top 20 economies.

What is traditional left? Marxism-Leninism? Socialism is and has been a wide spectrum since before the Russian revolution. Right now we're seeing an uptick in extreme right tendencies in Europe but top 20 economy countries such as the UK, France, Brazil and Germany do have solid leftist parties.

The leftists I know are socialists, anarchists, and communists. They are very much doing the work both politically (I live in the Pacific Northwest, where socialists are on the ballot regularly) and locally (e.g. via Food Not Bombs or restoring land to natural states).

There definitely are academics, in organizations like the DSA. But there's practical folks too.

We used to call this liberalism

Like most publications, they have editorial constraints, and usually choose to discuss the breaking news rather than rehash older facts. Reason has been covering this highly complex and lengthy case for nearly a decade, they have published dozens of articles about it, unfortunately for you they did not address your specific question in detail in this particular article. I think if you dig a bit deeper you'll find answers.

edit - 2 minutes of searching past Reason articles:

That Lacey was convicted of "international concealment money laundering" is bizarre, since the money transfer was not concealed: His lawyer informed the IRS about it, as required by law. And it was not made for nefarious purposes, according to Scottsdale lawyer John Becker's trial testimony. Lacey had needed some place to park his savings after U.S. banks, scared by a years-long propaganda crusade against Backpage, had decided doing business with the company or its associates was a reputational risk. So Becker and another lawyer advised Lacey to deposit the money—$17 million, on which taxes had been paid—with a foreign bank.

It's hard to see how Lacey conducted a financial transaction "to conceal or disguise the nature, the location, the source, the ownership, or the control of the proceeds of specified unlawful activity," even if you accept the government's premise that this money was derived from unlawful activity. And, to be clear, I don't accept that premise, since Backpage's business should have been protected by the First Amendment (not to mention Section 230 of federal communications law).