When I was in 7th grade, we learned about "yellow journalism," a phenomenon named in the 1900's in which newspaper owners held a war of words using their media properties in order to boost sales.
Our classroom exercise was to take a physical/printed newspaper and highlight in yellow all of the adjectives or non-factual sections of the articles. We ended up with some yellow, but mostly the newspaper of 1970-something (I'm not saying the exact year, people) passed the sniff test.
Fast forward to today, when every single web page and social network has a "news feed." One of the final holdouts, Google's search page, just caved in.
The thought I'm pondering this morning is whether we really need all of this "news." And I put it in quotes because a vast percentage of what appears in the "news feeds" isn't technically news. It wasn't written by trained journalists, it wasn't vetted or fact-checked by a team of professionals. Sometimes it's paid "native" content, sometimes it's "fake news," and sometimes it's just an interesting headline that's gained popularity by being shared a lot.
I wonder if it's too late to remind the general public that journalism is a thing that exists. There are people out there whose job it is to write the story of what actually happened on a given day. They are trained to answer the Who, What, Why, Where, When of the situation, presumably without slanted embellishments or opinions. (They're still out there, like the last unicorns.)
One reason the water has been muddied is because of the huge aggregator news sites that have large networks of "contributors" who are not journalists. They're simply writers who do work for hire. I won't name names, but Shmorbes and Shmuffington Shmost have had to clamp down on their networks to try to gain some sense of integrity (a work in progress). And yet the readers have no idea that the articles they're reading aren't news.
You might be rolling your eyes right now, saying, "reader beware," or "we all know there are PR folks out there generating stories." But there's a difference between getting information/facts from a PR person as a component of a story, and copy/pasting a press release wholesale. Or worse, scraping a false headline from another site and running with it.
I don't have an answer to the problem, but I do know that adding more "news feeds" to the screen is not it.