[xpe]

I also want news organizations to be more transparent and honest. The incentives are complicated. Perhaps some sort of ratings system could help.

I think I’d be willing to go further. Purely from an economic perspective, there are negative externalities that result from poor quality news organizations. Current market mechanisms seem to reward polarization.

So what do we do?

A common response is: let’s educate people to pay more attention to their critical thinking and media diet. This can work if people change habits to align with higher level thinking. With more high-quality aggregation options, the easier this gets for individuals.

An uncommon response (that would attract the ire of many) would be to impose economic penalties on the organizations that correspond to their negative externalities. Perhaps tax them like cigarettes. It is hard to think of targeted policy interventions that don’t have all sorts of loopholes.

In broad strokes, perhaps the best solutions I know about at present are carrots. Spend generously on high-quality news organizations.

(This is just a first draft and could stand a lot of improvement.)