- The Hutchins Commission, as it came to be known, met seventeen times...
It identified five essential mandates: first, providing “a truthful, comprehensive, and intelligent account of the day’s events”; second, furnishing a forum for discussion of “all the important viewpoints and interests in the society”; third, offering a “representative picture” of society and its various groups; fourth, educating the public on “the ideals towards which the community should strive”; and fifth, making information available to everybody.
The press, the commission found, was failing to meet all of these requirements.
The off the cuff comment I made below about universities taking on this role was sort of along those lines. It has the infrastructure in place already. However, I'm not sure that it is possible to just publish "facts". The phone book is about the most objective document we have, to paraphrase Werner Herzog, but its utility is pretty shallow. The act of selecting which facts to publish is similar to framing a photograph, which is deliberately selective. So in that sense opinion is woven into the fabric of reporting. I think the responsibility is to make an honest effort to ask and answer a question, and that's where journalists could apply scientific reasoning better. Having a point of view as a starting point is fine to me. What's not fine is hewing to your point of view when all evidence points to it being wrong.I don't think our media will survive much longer until we establish a publicly funded media organization that is dedicated to only publishing facts as they see them, and not analyses or opinions of the facts, however "objective" those opinions are believed to be.
I think there are two additional (and related) questions that are perhaps even more fundamental. 1. How to ensure that a press outlet that meets those requirements can survive economically, and 2. How to ensure that people actually seek out said outlet when more viscerally appealing alternatives exist. The current press climate or culture or whatever you want to call it didn't come about in a vacuum.
It's almost as if university journalism departments should just become the new press. It makes sense to a degree because there are a lot of them that could be local reporting, there are fewer big ones that could do international reporting, and there are tons of students to do research and copy editing. They could get support from endowments, supplemented by reader fees. I find it strange that the practice of journalism and the teaching are so separate, when in other scientific endeavors (if you think, as Lippman did, that journalism can or should be "scientific") are taught by the people doing the work itself. Could be a way to make a public good while also removing a big profit motive.