There is simply too much noise/signal. We truly need a protected class of speech/news that cannot lie by law. This is similar to standardizing currency in order to facilitate trade without risk, except for information.
Human speech just doesn't lend itself to the type of formalism required for this to be possible. If you want the closest approximation, look at legal jargon, specifically for contracts: It is a set of speech standards that evolved over centuries in an effort to reduced ambiguity in transactions. As a result, it is extremely verbose to the point of incomprehensibility by outsiders, and it's still possible to deliberately misuse it without easy detection.
Free speech is important for a free society, although we are moving away in recent years with all of the platform censorship and truth labeling. While this censorship is technically legal, these platforms are used like public land and are training generations of people to undervalue freedom of expression.
Academia has been trying for centuries to crack this nut, and it is not easy.
We'll be prosecuted for sending communications across state lines to mislead a child under Texas's Anti-Critical Race Theory statute.
We're nearly there already, happy to ban clearly-marked Iranian, Russian, and Chinese state media. Those actions have already been used by private media to ban US journalists by associations as weak as sharing the same opinions as enemy media outlets.
So, probably the courts. That's an imperfect solution, but it beats the hell out of the position that any attempt to arbitrate the truth is unacceptably oppressive.
On another level: everyone has an obligation to arbitrate the truth as honestly and ably as they're capable, in every domain they have responsibility for, first and foremost in training themselves to be more careful about their own blind spots, tendencies, incentives, and limits, and then in exercising whatever influence and authority they have.
Have you never thought about why freedom of speech is an important and worthy fundamental right?
You're confusing the fact that courts are legal institutions directed by legal professionals with the conception that's all they are. In fact, a court is a process. That process is guided by law, and results in legal findings, but it is not limited to the legal sphere when it comes to findings of fact and truth. Where a court lacks specialists in truth, advocates on both sides will find whatever ways they can to bring them to the discussion.
And again, there is no such thing as rule of law without examining questions truth. You want liability for poor engineering standards? Courts must ascertain what good engineering standards are. You want murder to be illegal, and people to be tried for violating murder laws? Courts must ascertain evidence, often scientific evidence relating to whether or not someone is guilty. A court without capacity or authority to weigh in on truth cannot apply the law.
> Have you never thought about why freedom of speech is an important and worthy fundamental right?
Enough to know that speech and robust discourse are in fact a significant part of courtroom proceedings.
Once you have a courtroom deciding 'the truth' without respect to the law, that is my exit signal for that particular society.
LOL nice semantic game. Nobody thinks "arbiter of truth" means that court could, like, rule on a new gravitational constant or something and it would be so. It means that a court is a socially formalized process of speech & discourse for arbitrating who has the better case for accurately understanding a given question of truth. Which again, is absolutely necessary -- there will always be questions about what is or is not true at the heart of every court case.
Including already existing content-of-speech related laws like defamation. Creating a class of entities that opt-in to heightened obligations on this front in order to address the problems as the AC was thinking wouldn't change this.
It sounds like you want some kind of labeling system, kind of like 'USDA Organic' certification, but for news organizations. Sure, the courts could try to interpret whether or not a news organization satisfies some criteria for this label, but I wouldn't call the result of their ruling 'the truth'.
Assuming consensus could be found among 'experts', consensus isn't a magic bullet. I have no doubt this would turn into a game of cherry-picking sources and feed the litigation culture we have. I personally wouldn't attribute any increased credibility nor usefulness to any such labeling scheme. I would actually trust it less and avoid it entirely.
And yes, if such a system existed people would actually think the output of the process you describe is the absolute truth, much like a gravitational constant. It would further bifurcate our society and in the end, likely be co-opted by some political party to silence the other.
Truth is not like that. It's must be absolute, and it should not be defined arbitrarily based on what improves people's well-being. (Or maybe it should, but that's going to be a different kind of truth.)