I don’t think I fundamentally disagree with anything you said, except your conclusion, my position would be, that it’s macro forces that make news organization ABC untenable and untrustworthy. if ABC kept being ABC the pattern you noticed would have happened anyway, maybe just faster or differently.

And maybe counterintuitively, I think a real ABC would be the least trusted source of all.

The only alternative I think would be to go back to a time where there was only an ABC(haha).

I do think it’s interesting that the only solution people come up to these problems is something authoritarian, this isn’t a criticism of you actually, I don’t know your politics but it’s something I’ve been wrestling with lately. Is the only way to have a free/informed/unified society to have total control of the information flow? Or total control of the culture?

Or maybe asked another way, how do you create the ABC that people want to watch when there’s so much other media out there customized to your exact perspective.

There’s also the fact that ABC is inherently conservative(small c) because what about D! And E! and L!