> News can be false, misleading, disproven, untrustworthy, and many shades in between. In fact there are a lot more angles to information than a False/True bool

> News can be false, misleading, disproven, untrustworthy, and many shades in between. In fact there are a lot more angles to information than a False/True boolean. Ideally this range could be quantified using publisher trust scores where publishers rate the reliability of each other using cardinal utilities and distributed public web of trust. > sometimes trustworthy news outlets deliver a misleading stories, as in the case of Iraq WMDs or Y2K. If the conclusions which a rational reader is likely to draw from reading an article are incorrect, then the reliability and trust score of a publisher should decrease, and we should not be able to claim that the news outlet was in fact wholly 'trustworthy'. As you stated, 'shades in between'. > But since skepticism and logic don't increase readership or viewership, unfortunately those qualities aren't encouraged News agencies which publish high quality information for an initially small number of readers should in principle still be able to generate profit by generating greater total utility per person. Part of the problem as to why they are not able to do so is that they are not able to implement 'value capture' for this utility using current web browser technologies. This might be because there is no open one-time payment protocol associated with electronic news reader applications analagous to giving a dollar to the operator of a local newspaper stand on the street, where people used to be able to pay for a 'little bit' of the news on the margin.