I wish there were a fact checking website that allowed checking any article and calculating scores e.g how many claims are linked, where do the links point to (available or not), are the linked pages trust-worthy themselves, detecting link circles ( A -> B -> C -> A), and so on. Or at least something that provided us the tools to do community fact-checking in the open.

most towns used to have more than one newspaper and they used to display their political bias happily on the front page.

all the sides were represented by five or six different people discussing an issue with maybe each person bringing a different side from a different paper to the discussion.

tv and cable and internet tore apart that public dialectic.

and it forced fewer papers to try to portray more sides "equally".

now a city is lucky if it has one newspaper. and they can't possibly cover every angle any longer because if you have been in a newsroom in the past 15 years for most small to medium town they are like four people now when 30 was required for reporting, photography, editing, and classified section. And the big towns now might have two that both bend towards the middle from the left and right with a stripped down, skinny and pissed workers.

So sorry conversation amongst a varied and well read public is required for that to work.

and no one reads anymore we all just write and move on.

When reading hard news from an outlet that actually hires journalists I consider that to be the source.

When reading opinion I definitely do a bit more digging, keeping an eye out for half truths. I wouldn't consider this to be journalism

No? For a start, journalists write news, are you writing it down in an article afterwards?