You can't suppress bad ideas without also suppressing legitimate ideas, because 1) ideas need to be exchanged in the first place before anyone can figure out wh

You can't suppress bad ideas without also suppressing legitimate ideas, because 1) ideas need to be exchanged in the first place before anyone can figure out whether they're legitimate, and 2) the wrong people will inevitably get the power to decide what's legitimate. I'm not being more optimistic than you. I'm just being realistic. No, I'm not advocating vote suppression. I'm advocating education. Which, as you said, looks like a lost cause, at least in the United States. But if there's no way to win this war without suppressing and silencing somebody, well, so be it. Letting people consume crap doesn't seem all that bad compared to violating civil rights. Moreover, the sentiment expressed in the parent post that we've been talking about doesn't seem all that different from your observation that there will always be more crap than real news and that people in general don't want to be educated. They're both statements about the current state of journalism and news consumers, albeit with different kinds of exaggeration and flourish. We could talk all day about the causes of this problem and how we might fix it, but allowing people to vent their frustration about a problem is not part of the problem.