> Unfortunately it has become obvious that no such authorities exist. The President lies. The Governors lie. The NYT lies. The WHO lies. CNN lies. Fox lies.
So, just like it's always been?
> The old ways to make sense of the world no longer work.
What were those old ways? From what I recall, the "old ways" was to believe lies fed to you, which caused all kinds of problems - not very different from today. Lies about women, gays, people of other races, people of other religions, people of other ethnicities, people of certain professions, etc. Looking at history through perhaps a tinted lens, these were all common problems in the "old days" - the only difference is that now it's a bit harder to hide them. To an extent, some of the tumult you see today is due to people realizing that being lied to was common and the norm, coupled with the ability to have a platform to counter what they perceive as lies. That a lot of this "countering" is likely as misinformed as the original lies is sad, but not surprising. I cannot say, though, that accepting lies from authority as people generally did in the past was "better".
> If there is any unifying experience these days in America is confusion. No one knows what is going on, no one knows what the truth really is, we just react to whatever meme manages to get past our jaded weariness. The old ways to make sense of the world no longer work.
I think we're in agreement about what is going on. My stance is that I don't think "the old ways to make sense of the world" was good - especially not when you were on the receiving end of things, and pretty much all of society around you acted as if the problems didn't exist, or dismissively justified them.
> We need Journalism. Real Journalism
We've always had it, and still do, or we've never had it, and never will, depending on how you view the glass.
Journalism, in the traditional sense, has its place, but will never "solve" this problem. There never has been a model of journalism that satisfies all of:
1. Covers a wide variety of topics well
2. Can find "bias-free" funding (i.e. nonreliance on ads, etc).
You'll get instances of journalism that do a really good job by having a very narrow focus (e.g. Pro Publica), or you'll get stuff like the NYT (which as you said "lies").
We definitely need journalism, but we'll never solve the problem just with it. I don't think we'll ever "solve" this problem, given that in our thousands of years of history, we never solved it.