I’d go a step further and declare that “informed” really just means that they’ve been presented with certain information. I myself have had a quote of mine published in a news article and it was used in a way that was the complete opposite of what I was intending to convey to the interviewer. I experienced the Gell-Mann effect first hand.
“In a speech in 2002, Crichton coined the term Gell-Mann amnesia effect, after physicist Murray Gell-Mann. He used this term to describe the phenomenon of experts believing news articles on topics outside of their fields of expertise, even after acknowledging that articles written in the same publication that are within the experts' fields of expertise are error-ridden and full of misunderstanding”
In other words, when people read articles about something in their own field of expertise, they are able to pick the misrepresentations out easily. But they assume the rest of the news is straightforward because they don’t know any better and trust the journalist’s reporting as an accurate representation of what is happening.
A knowledge of history, unedited video footage of actual events, common sense, scepticism (of everyone, not just the 'enemy').
I've talked to reasonably intelligent programmers who got upset at a politicians speech they'd never heard. All they did was read a paraphrase of it from their favourite media outlet (who happened to be ill-disposed towards said politician).
A lot of the `events` of 2020-2021 were captured on unedited video. Few people I've talked to bothered to watch it. They relied on journalists. Didn't stop them forming a strong opinion though.
And without a knowledge of history (and mine is admittedly basic), you have zero context.
I suspect people who want to "make journalism better" and people who want to "inform the populace with 'not journalism'" are probably talking about the same thing.
(Not that I agree with this article, the "get CEOs to make people trust news" thing is bizarre)
“Making journalism better” implies some sort of smooth continuous transition to a new state, where (implicitly) the existing journalist class has not been liquidated and gets to keep their high-status credentialed writing jobs. This can’t really fix the core problem.