Note that charging for the news does not defend you against this.
This allows for full transparency with the audience, increasing trust, while also giving a public "anchor" to guage your work against.
Many organizations do just this. Outside of news it's often just called "culture" or "branding," but it's more important, IMO, to be explicit, public, and clear about this in a news setting, and very much can serve as away to defend against outside influence.
Sometimes there is no "other side" or the other side offers meaningless contribution. The trend to present oneself as unbiased have often given platforms to voices that are not worthy of having a platform, for whatever reason, and someone needs to make a call, and they should be transparent about it. Are they not giving time because they choose to ignore legitimate and useful information or because giving someone a platform to rehash all the bogus reasons that the moon landing was faked again isn't worth it (to use an extreme example). Moon landing deniers can set up their own web site to push their faked moon landing agenda, they don't need to clutter up everyone else's content with their nonsense in the name of "unbiased reporting".
It's the same for 100s of other topics on which there is strong arguments to be made that the proposal will have the opposite of the intended outcome.
The end result isn't that we're more informed and enlightened as content consumers. It's that everyone has their own version of reality. The boring neoliberal consensus of the old had many downsides, but at least it provided some social cohesion in that everyone was more or less reading the same news.
I'm not arguing that we should try to exaggerate our biases, or even to center them, but rather, we can become more honest by making our biases clear and explicit to those we're communicating with. Many organizations avoid openly addressing their biases, which makes them less honest overall, and more prone to being deceptive. If you're aware of your biases you can actually account for them, as opposed to letting them blind you. Further, if you're public with that awareness, others can account for them as well, and be less likely to be deceived (even accidentally) by your communication.
Too often, bias is ignored. It always exists. If we name it and make it visible, then we can have a chance at reducing its potential for deception.
The Wall Street Journal has always been openly conservative in their bias that is most on display in editorials while they maintain a high quality, generally center-right news reporting division.
Similarly the Economist describe their stance as "radically centrism", which sounds a little strange but they outline it pretty well and are open about it.
What grinds my gears is NPR. Every member drive they explicitly talk about how their coverage is fair and unbiased, which is way more egregious than some tagline. As far as having a bias and not owning up to it, I think they're the worst offenders right now.
The problem isn't bias per se - its the desire of some parties to clandestinely shape public opinion. Merely picking a purported bias and then claiming to work along it doesn't do anything to solve the real problem.
What we should be demanding is increased competence from our news suppliers. That's the way forward to getting more accurate, critical coverage of interests we dislike.
We've complained about bias for a generation and all we've gotten for it is less accountability and more mistrust.
The news is exactly what the public demands: garbage.
If we really wanted good journalism we'd have it.
Maybe what I really want is a paper heavily biased towards multiple academic perspectives, and less towards populist coverage.
Why do I care about my fellow citizen’s opinions? I feel like I’m drowning in my fellow citizens opinions.
Maybe I read the news for different reasons than other people. Why do you read the news?
What we should demand is not unbiased reporting, but transparency in editorial decision making and proactive disclosure of potential conflicts of interest.
That's the structural problem in a nutshell right there. If you're principled enough to do that, then you're at a disadvantage compared to others who are willing to play the access journalism game and the like. You can try to make it up by using your transparency and high standards to attract readers, but in the marketplace that strategy loses.
We've seen this play out. Respected news orgs stand on principle, take a hit but manage to get by on a perception of integrity. Eventually leadership shifts to gradually be more and more business-focused, justifying every step as good for readers and investors, speaking first about the delicate balance between integrity and reach and sustainability. Eventually these words become platitudes as more power shifts to those more interested in profit and power games than in anything the institution was founded on. Every step and every change along the way seems reasonable enough, prudent, even.
That's the trap you need to defend against. I don't know how you do that as a business, though. Setting yourself up as a nonprofit might help stave it off, but even that doesn't seem foolproof.
What I want is this theoretical set of educated perspectives that claim to represent a broad range of views; when an actual broad range of views is more likely to include pizzagate than Burkian conservatism..
Maybe thefp.com would be a good starting point to ask - why is that not what you’re looking for? If you squint your eyes it provides a balanced perspective.
It's a bit hard to judge the site since it doesn't show full articles, but it does seem to be supporting only one side of at least some narratives. For example, I didn't see any article on the genocide in gaza that wasn't denying its existence. That particular issue aside, my overall impression is that it probably does what many left leaning news sites do: try to remain factually accurate in what it says while only presenting one side of the story and neglecting stories on anything that doesn't forward their narrative. thefp.com is better than many other right leaning news sites since it isn't just outright lying all the time (no pizzagate), but it's not honest reporting or covering enough perspectives. I might have just checked it at a bad time but it also seems very heavy on opinion instead of actual news or investigative reporting. It's got a lot to say about moms and politicians and celebrities but nothing about Nagatitan.