Hey, folks. I fucked up and jumped the gun by unilaterally changing the rules to exclude commercial sources without consulting the admins.
We are all in agreement that the state of commercial journalism is either disrepair or complete failure, but we’re working on how to best address that. Though I deleted that post, I’ve kept the copy and am using the suggestions in conjunction with the thoughts of others, both users and admins/mods.
This new rule remains in the sidebar while we work together as a community (this includes you) to determine how that looks in practice. We hope to be very shortly sharing a list of preferred, trustworthy sites, and it’s looking like neither a whitelist nor blacklist is really feasible.
So I’m going to ask everyone to be vigilant. Call out fascist bullshit when you see it by submitting a report. I do want everyone feeling like they can contribute to the community, with an eye to making sure we don’t become part of the problem.
Watch this space for further developments. Your input is definitely welcome.
I like the preferred list concept. I also didn’t hate when lemmy world used a bot on news subs to post the media source’s political leaning and overall credibility to every submission. Many disagreed with the bot’s source of information, but what if every submission here got an automatic pinned **This source lacks consistent credibility because reasons… ** type post with you maintaining the list/assessment the bot draws from?
Between moderation of the worst of the worst and a strong disclaimer on dubious sources, it might help visitors gain better media literacy.
Problem with that is that orgs do not universally suffer from the same issues. When I was writing out the opening post here, I made it a point to say that a quality source was necessary but insufficient for news determination. Everyone puts out some fluff.
I truly don’t think we can do this at the domain level and achieve the desired results.