I'd very much like to find a news outlet that takes a STEM and systems oriented approach to news gathering, but as far as I'm aware no such thing exists. In my view the humanities oriented population has certainly failed to produce trustworthy news, or at least, failed to do so reliably over the long term. I attribute this to lack of systems designed to recognise that journalists have power, power corrupts and therefore journalists should expect themselves and others to become corrupted with time. News organisations seem to have little or nothing in the way of systems designed to keep them in check.
Fact checkers? No, never encountered any sign of them. And I would have done given that in the past I've been a go-to source for major news outlets on a technical topic.
References to primary sources? Journalists are by and large allergic to links, although I've noticed that the more modern the news source, the more linky they tend to be. When they use links they typically link only to their own coverage; presumably they value hits and ad views more than making it easy for people to double check their work.
Systematising how stories are selected and publishing that system? No.
Making it easy to follow a story and discover if previous stories were retracted? No. Stories are sometimes updated post publication to reflect that they were wrong, but such retractions are never publicised anywhere and short of manually polling previously visited URLs you can't find out that this has happened.
Unfortunately I believe that the lack of action taken to increase trust by the mainstream news outlets is deliberate. Journalism doesn't pay well, journalism thus attracts people for whom power is a part of the compensation package. Namely the power to influence the direction of society in ways more to their liking. I frequently encounter journalism in big league western outlets that is flatly misleading or fraudulent in ways that can only be deliberate. It has reached the point where I maintain a mental blacklist of topics, on which I automatically assume anything I read in the media is a lie designed to manipulate me (current number 1 position: anything Russia related, but there are others).
It's for this reason that I don't believe that existing mainstream media publications will ever be able to increase trust in themselves - being untrustworthy is literally a part of the job appeal. It will take a new generation of companies built along entirely different values, with different business models and which select their writers from different parts of the population (probably that means no 'professional' full time journalists, just lots of part time specialised writers).
Fact checkers? No, never encountered any sign of them. And I would have done given that in the past I've been a go-to source for major news outlets on a technical topic.
References to primary sources? Journalists are by and large allergic to links, although I've noticed that the more modern the news source, the more linky they tend to be. When they use links they typically link only to their own coverage; presumably they value hits and ad views more than making it easy for people to double check their work.
Systematising how stories are selected and publishing that system? No.
Making it easy to follow a story and discover if previous stories were retracted? No. Stories are sometimes updated post publication to reflect that they were wrong, but such retractions are never publicised anywhere and short of manually polling previously visited URLs you can't find out that this has happened.
Unfortunately I believe that the lack of action taken to increase trust by the mainstream news outlets is deliberate. Journalism doesn't pay well, journalism thus attracts people for whom power is a part of the compensation package. Namely the power to influence the direction of society in ways more to their liking. I frequently encounter journalism in big league western outlets that is flatly misleading or fraudulent in ways that can only be deliberate. It has reached the point where I maintain a mental blacklist of topics, on which I automatically assume anything I read in the media is a lie designed to manipulate me (current number 1 position: anything Russia related, but there are others).
It's for this reason that I don't believe that existing mainstream media publications will ever be able to increase trust in themselves - being untrustworthy is literally a part of the job appeal. It will take a new generation of companies built along entirely different values, with different business models and which select their writers from different parts of the population (probably that means no 'professional' full time journalists, just lots of part time specialised writers).