Fact-Based Journalism Isn’t Dead. But We Need to Work to Keep It Alive.

We’ve created perverse incentives to just tell people what they want to hear, instead of telling them the truth.

I’ve been wrestling with a disturbing question for the last several months: Do people even want fact-based journalism anymore?

For most of my 25 years working in media, I would have told you that question was absurd. Verified, on-the-record reporting was the dominant model in American media for decades (however imperfectly newsrooms executed it). That me…