Without laws to require fair and balanced journalism, over time the media becomes a doomsday scroll of extremes. Especially vulnerable to mistruths are those who work with their hands, for they lack the luxury of increasing their logical thinking defences as the more academically employed do.
Society, from the busy doctor to the road labourer, has long outsourced its higher critical thinking capacities to journalism; thus no complex peaceful society can thrive without a competent and fair press capable of condensing philosophy, science, empathy and logic into easy-to-digest articles.
Good journalism lights up the prefrontal cortex of the reader, not the primitive structures of the brain. For what we think and how we think it builds us. Our journalists are part of societal health, another sort of doctor capable of igniting healing pathways with the right words.