That's not really a viable option for the general public. The media and the public are far more intertwined and mutually implicated than either chooses to acknowledge. As Brooke Gladstone argues in her graphic book "The Influencing Machine," maybe all we can really hope for is is more explicit acknowledgement of news media biases. It used to be easy to discern honest and biased media because there were relatively so few outlets to inundate people. In the 1890s when Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst practically invented "yellow journalism" is was easy to spot, be it in terms of sensationalist stories and headlines or that of a distinct bias. Most people knew what they were reading. (Great quote from an English magazine in 1898 noted, "All American journalism is not ‘yellow’, though all strictly ‘up-to-date’ yellow journalism is American!")
But now with the advent of the Internet and electronic media, and with it being so easy for vastly large numbers of media outlets to connect in real-time in collusion with each other (and in far too many cases, political campaigns and elected officials), and the desire for people to seek out confirmational biased news, it makes it far more difficult to see unless you make the effort and know what you're looking for.
A system of objective metrics used by the public may hold news media more accountable:
- ratio of fact statements to judgement (editorial) statements
- fraction of arguments that are well reasoned (i.e., conclusion follows logically from premise)
- reliance on credentialed experts rather than staff analysts (esp. for TV)
And journalists interviewing journalists is just the worst.
The anger of the public is beginning to be recognized by many in the media, although they aren't really doing anything about it. The Wikileaks files that shine a bright light on the media will help dial it back, but it won't eliminated it. Few would argue that complete objectivity is possible. As a group, journalists probably have more opinions than most, and it is very rare that a reporter starts working on a story without having some point of view. The liberal bias in media isn't going away, as most journalists are liberals to begin with. What journalists should know, and the public should expect, it not a bland restatement of the facts, but objectivity it the method and not necessarily in the journalist. Meaning, journalists inevitably arrive to a story with bias that they needed objectivity as a discipline to test that bias against the evidence so as to produce journalism that is be closer to truth.
After all, the role of the journalist is to be an honest broker of the truth. That doesn't mean it can't have a bias, a point of view. It just needs to be honestly brokered. What is happening in this election cycle in particular (and has been going on in general ever since Watergate) is a dishonest brokering of the truth. where they claim no bias (that's the first red flag) while surreptitiously advancing the goals of a political agenda.
All the public can really do is use the objective metrics above in their own assessments of news, and call the press out on it when they fail to deliver an honest brokering of the news. I'm afraid, though, that little will change without a change in ratings or subscribership at the major outlets.
