1] Trust the media more?: There are parts of the media — the so-called MSM — I trust very much, but I recognize that not everyone I converse with does. The NYT is still my go-to, but I will generally believe what I read in most major newspapers and national news magazines [Atlantic, Newsweek, etc]. I don’t know how to get everyone back on board with the MSM, now that Fox has ‘won’ — i.e., so many seem to believe that the MSM, like Fox, is just a partial, biased view. Even if a national ratings board were created for ranking the trustworthiness of news outlets, there would now be charges of bias [much as I hear against Snopes these days].
2] I’m all for regulating the social media sites that have become de facto news media, oftentimes the primary ‘delivery’ for how people receive their news, but it’s a tricky business: there are outliers in the news that are doing BETTER news in many ways than the MSM, and you wouldn’t want those tossed in the bin along with Russian bots and distortion-spreaders. Still, regulation must start to occur on these sites. I see that.
3] My son has already been learning in his middle school about checking the trustworthiness of even ‘news source’ lookalikes, so I think much is being done. However, I don’t know how to get everyone on board with this. Healing the epistemic division is much harder to contemplate than the tips for sorting sources — and even those tips only go up to a point. [It reminds me of how I wrestled for a few years with how to keep students from doing historical research for Dracula on the tempting Jack the Ripper topic before I finally just outlawed any Ripper essays altogether, because the students could not be expected to sort the historically tenuous/speculative resources from the real ones.]
4] I wish I had any good ideas on this desperately important crisis in journalism. When the civic need for a viable fourth estate runs up against entertainment and choice, yipes.
5] I believe the social media giants will begin to use internal bots and programs to warn against sketchy sources as they appear in one’s feed, as that will be a better model than outright censorship. But then there will be ways to game them and move around them, no doubt.