I submit clarity would improve even more.

By clarity, I mean fact and opinion very clearly differentiated.

Facts are common.

For a given story:

There are facts.

Some of those may be disputed. Fine. Great discussion to have.

At some point, we arrive at opinion, and this generally is what the authors believe the facts mean.

Bias colors all of that. There is always bias.

Always.

The emphasis on clarity gets at the influence of bias by making it easy to understand what the bias actually is.

Currently, we largely sidestep bias with various, low clarity arguments:

Official

Fair and Balanced

Objective (this actually takes a number of us working together over a sustained time to do. You can be 1000 percent sure it does not ever happen in a cable news cycle. Ever.)

Size, with 3 and up to few letter big players attempting to be reputable because reasons.

You get the idea.

Clarity is powerful. It implies accuracy, helps people to understand bias and when bias is different from stated intent or claims of authority, or publication of record, note, stature.

Did I mention there is always bias?

Always?

A great example in the US might be coverage from the labor point of view versus big business point of view.

Larger, established organizations rarely publish or broadcast from the labor point of view. Low clarity material makes understanding that as well as what is fact and what is opinion very hard to discern.

Small orgs, indie media, often does more from the labor point of view, and lower clarity beings the same difficulty.

Many more examples abound!

Low clarity facilitates endless meta too:

Who is objective? (Nobody in reality, but they all say "the other people" are "a problem" or "are untrustworthy" somehow.

This is all expensive and useless.

I could go on.

Greater clarity. It will help. By nature, it is more accurate. It makes bias more easily understood.

And on that point, bias is OK! It takes too many of us too long to be objective. We can benefit from well understood bias and seek multiple points of view to help us be informed and form our own opinions.

Clarity requires disclosure.

It will also force truth in branding.

"News you can trust" means nothing when it is an unclear mess of fact, opinion, bias all mashed together to get a reaction, is it?

Nope.

I submit a push for clarity does the most good.

I say that, because we can't solve the thinking for people problem. We can Empower them to think better, and we can give them more clear material to think with, and we can foster discussion that encourages common ground, but we can't actually think for them.

And just as an example, when I was a little kid in primary school we had a media class.

That class covered the basic types of propaganda, with advertising as a vehicle to demonstrate all of them. It had a topic on bias, identifying the point of view from which the piece was written and why that matters.

It even talked about clarity. In any given piece, are fact and opinion well differentiated?

Where they aren't, that piece isn't very reputable, or useful, or the minimum you need to do is seek more information if you're intrigued at all.

We read articles from the labor point of view, we read articles written from overseas, ones from the local newspaper, from big business, and we talked about them and we found the common facts and we found out how to think for ourselves.

That was seventh grade. In a small backward town no less!

I am regularly shocked at how poor our media is today, and how ill-equipped so many of us are to deal with it.

All of these rule based schemes avoid both the clarity and trust problems inherent in all media.

Secondly, they sidestep the intended discourse!

Not only are we supposed to be thinking for ourselves, but we are to be understanding one another well enough for policy discussions to make better overall sense!

All of this is why we used to teach critical thinking in primary education.

Today, we do not do that very well and look at the mess!

Software won't fix this. Humans doing the work to improve will.