Ah, I see your point about outsourced thinking. If you take a bunch of informed, critical thinkers who do their research and point them at the same group of so

Ah, I see your point about outsourced thinking. If you take a bunch of informed, critical thinkers who do their research and point them at the same group of sources, I wager you'd end up with a largely consistent set of questions being asked, and relatively "factual"(from the pov of an average American) group of answers (who owns them, how was this article paid for, etc). Through this, you could make whatever bias exists in a piece really explicit (loosely defined as relations & incentives). So the "vetting" toolsets that make this easy and available are what make consuming news more humane. I think the "ministry of truth" thought is valid, because an organization started off of good will and good intent might be that way for a while, but after it is cemented in and the people who run it filter out, the power structure it leaves is ripe for abuse. But this is what the hard question is: how might we tackle this, beyond just telling people to think better? If you had to create a new "article" primitive, meaning, you had to have these things to be considered an article, what would you put in it to aid explicit bias and relieve the burden on informed thinkers? (Title, Author, Contents, ...)