[FeatureRush]

We already had similar discussion here in Poland couple years ago. The thing was: should all on-line news sites be officially registered in similar way as paper newspapers? Then what about blogs, personal webpages and other sites that are not strictly news sites but do happen to publish/spread news? Obviously it went nowhere. It would create a new barrier for a lots of people trying to simply publish something on the Internet and would not really fix much. Not to mention that in Poland there are already mechanisms in place to stop/punish people spreading harmful information, and that laws are not tied to any specific medium - do you not have those in USA? If the news/article/comment/etc is untrue then someone can sue, right?

The real problem here is that people put trust in things they should be skeptic about and the official certification not only doesn't fix it, actually it could make it worse depending on who is in power...

[kolinko]

Registration and accreditation/verification are two different things. In Poland, the govrnment wanted to register websites, without fact-chekcing afaik

[FeatureRush]

You are probably right, it was some time ago, but did they also not wanted other things that paper publications are required, like storing copy in some archive?

Anyway, accreditation would make it even more troublesome and still would not solve the root issue and even if we focus on scenario OP described: FB ranking the news by trust, there are still many loopholes here. Like publishing true news with a spin or simply spamming worthless articles "Random Celebrity said good things about President Candidate" - just that alone would still do the trick.