Fake news was illegal in 17th century colonial Massachusetts

> whistleblowing

Keep in mind, I’m not suggesting that the source would need to be named; I’m only suggesting that the data from the source would need to be able to be independently recollected from the same source.

In the example of a whistleblower, that would mean that the journalist would need to ensure that there was some secure anonymous route by which other journalists could get in contact with the same whistleblower to independently verify their story.

You wouldn't have done your job, as a journalist, until you had provided a reproducible way for someone else to come along and re-do your investigation without you, ending up with all the same facts, if not the same beliefs.

> Who gets to decide whether that particular conclusion is or not supported by the facts?

My proposal would be to separate journalism from editorial or opinionated conclusions. "The news" itself would only contain objectively-verifiable facts, without opinions; and then it would be the job of magazines, talk-shows, etc. to “interpret” the news, in much the same way the current news media itself currently interprets things like scientific papers.

In other words, “news” intended for the public would be trimmed down to the most boring and dry possible version of itself—like a cross between a wire service and a police scanner. Anything that wasn’t such, couldn’t legally be called “news”, nor could it suggest by its formatting that it is news. There would be a separation between "news" and "opinion" in about the same way there is an FDA-managed separation between "food" and "drugs"; and there would be public-awareness campaigns to make it clear that this division exists, and that any fact found in "opinion" sources that you haven't independently heard from a "news" source is suspect at best and more likely an active psy-op.

But, again, the state wouldn't be responsible for declaring who can or cannot publish (just like the FDA isn't responsible for saying who can or cannot manufacture drugs; and the SEC isn't responsible for saying who can or cannot sell equity.) The only job of this hypothetical MiniTruth would be to say—according to a very objective, independently calculable bar, determined by Congress—whether what a given party is publishing can legally be called "news" or not; and to punish parties that do call their publications "news" if they have not met the requirements to do so.

(Of course, there's no such thing as an unbiased source. The curated set of facts that end up put together into a news article is itself an editorial choice. But we already have a news media that generates every possible combination of such facts, so that bias, at least, sort of "evens out.")

The beauty of Snopes is that it provides citations for its particular claims. People saying "Snopes is biased" in response to a Snopes article being posted don't tend to provide citations for why they think that particular Snopes article is inaccurate.

"Thankfully, we've learned a few things since then"

I think "learning" might be a misleading analogy for how societies evolve... "evolve" is probably also a misleading analogy

Now that there are actually investigators on the ground, we can begin to answer those questions. Until the OPCW releases their report, we don't know that their was any gas released there at all. If there was, we won't know who released it.

If one were to ignore political biases, I think they would admit that there was more motive for the rebels to stage a gas attack to create international pressure for a cease-fire that allows them to escape a surrounded and hopeless position, than for Assad to bring the wrath of the world down upon himself to gas a completely surrounded and hopeless enemy. If you don't at least admit that such a thing warrants investigation, you are not being honest.

Were you troubled at how quickly the "political mainstream" came to consensus on what happened there, before any investigation had occurred?

There is an entire world of straight-up fabricated "journalism" disguised as reputable reporting which gets immense circulation on social media networks. It is very easy to not experience this sort of thing, using fairly basic but overall uncommon steps. For instance, I don't use Twitter and I've filtered all my random acquaintances (e.g. random people I knew in high school) from my FB feed years ago. But there are patently false links being passed around at an enormous rate on these sites, and people that don't personally invest themselves into that sort of social media, or simply don't discriminate between who they see stuff from, get exposed to it a lot.