The ideal situation our brains want is a close friend with high social status who entertains us with compelling and digestible narratives about what's really go

The ideal situation our brains want is a close friend with high social status who entertains us with compelling and digestible narratives about what's really going on. A news outlet that only deals in cold hard facts, consensus, and objective numbers will simply never be able to out-compete a retweetable headline from a famous journalist with a sensationalized and entertaining version of the facts. For one thing, I am not convinced we have cracked a way in general of translating cold hard data and situations with scant evidence into a decent lay understanding. So in some ways news-as-entertainment media may even succeed in communicating actual reality better than a list of facts ever could, even if everyone's understanding is pretty shit on average. By using clickbait and sensation to turn a profit they can even do it more sustainably while Objective News Corp goes out of business (or more likely starts to slowly become more like everyone else). Maybe we'll find effective scientific ways to measure how news outlets and specific authors tend to do at predicting future developments through implication or otherwise, but I think the more realistic boring reality is that the broad ecosystem will just trudge ahead on a bumpy road and converge on a few marginally better ways of reporting and interpreting news.