We in the United States are so mired in low-quality, low-information, conservative-slanted corporate "news" coverage that we often think this is a unique problem and that other countries have some sort of high-quality elite journalism corps that we lost decades ago. That perception is reinforced when we compare how sources like the BBC, the Guardian, Der Spiegel, and even, surprisingly, Al Jazeera and the Russian RT News cover events versus the inane, often flagrantly propagandistic pap we're fed by US news media.
So it can be a little disconcerting when you talk to some people overseas - including in Europe - who find some prominent US sources that cover events relevant to them more credible than their own domestic media. You start to realize something interesting: News organizations in general are terrible at covering things in their own social and political context. When swimming in their own waters, journalists and editors are far more susceptible to corruption and intimidation, but can display remarkable objectivity and clarity of understanding when they're reporting on something from the outside that doesn't directly affect the interests and authorities that control them.
I came to this realization when scanning through English-language Youtube videos of CCTV, a state-run Chinese media source. On everything except internal Chinese politics or matters directly relating to it, the coverage seemed objective, intelligent, and reasonably thorough, and you don't really expect that - you expect it to be like Fox News with a Beijing bent, just as if you weren't familiar with Al Jazeera you might think it would have a profound political bent toward the prejudices of Middle Eastern politics. But what you find, surprisingly, is that except where the interests of the controlling authorities are concerned, these organizations are allowed to function as real journalistic enterprises.
Of course, where those interests are concerned, they leverage the credibility built up in the rest of their coverage to skew things toward a given agenda, but to a foreign audience the agenda-driven elements are easily identified and dismissed, if not being completely irrelevant to them in the first place. So it's kind of a free lunch: The laughably biased and/or tiptoe-careful way that Chinese media covers Chinese government activities doesn't affect audiences who aren't surrounded by it 24/7, just as the agendas of the Foxified/Villager media in this country don't have any affect on audiences who aren't surrounded by them all the time. In other words, you get the high-quality stuff while the poison just slides right off - and you get far more of the former and much less of the latter than their domestic audiences, because they have to adjust themselves to even be remotely viable overseas. We would not listen to the crap that's fed to Chinese domestic audiences, and Europeans would not listen to the crap we're fed by our media, but apparently everyone involved exports their A-games.
In this realization, I think we have the kernel of a strategy for how to guarantee robust, high-quality worldwide journalism: First off, as a consumer, watch high-credibility foreign news coverage whenever practical over domestic sources, because their potential interests in deceiving you are far narrower than those that deal with you politically and economically on a daily basis. The handful of pervasive mega-corporations that own US media want to control every aspect of your life, from your politics to your basic understanding of reality, but a foreign news source not aligned with them - even if they're fully or semi-state-run - has no practical interest whatsoever in deceiving you on the vast majority of subjects: Their goal is simply to build up their own credibility so that when their controlling authorities do find it convenient, they can effectively slant coverage of issues pertaining to them.
But on those issues, you can simply watch some other news source and easily identify the disparity. You obviously can't trust US news media owned and operated by plutocrats to report on economic inequality in America, or Chinese media organs to report on brutal human rights abuses by the Chinese government, or even necessarily a venerable institution like the BBC to report on British politics without some corrupting awareness of the environment in which they operate, but when they all overlap you can get something like real journalism. For instance, Der Spiegel's coverage of economic inequality in the US is tip-top, and BBC coverage of other countries' environmental irresponsibility is often brilliant, and - although we in the US aren't really allowed to see it much - apparently some US news organizations like Time magazine create high-quality coverage for overseas audiences.
Aside from just independently broadening your sources, there are more formal, institutional things we can do - e.g., something that could be called news exchange programs. Think about this: Philanthropically funded projects where journalists from one or several other countries are invited to a given country to cover some important story with significant social, economic, and political implications that tend to skew domestic coverage. Because they have no professional interest in kowtowing to the Powers That Be in the subject country, nor any in dumbing down their coverage to appeal to some programming director's infotainment agenda, they should tend to be more objective. Then the resulting news coverage would be distributed to US news organizations in the same way that wire services like AP and Reuters do so, and failure to air it - or airing it in a biased way - could lead to questions about a given domestic source's agenda.
And every country with anything even remotely resembling a free press could participate, so that over time you build up mutual understanding, mutual education, and journalists teaming up across borders to hold each other and the authorities and interests that influence or control them accountable. I've watched enough fascinating coverage on Japanese NHK TV, Al Jazeera, RT, and now CCTV to know that I want to know what people in these countries see when they come here, or what anyone sees where they go anywhere else. I want to know what Australians think of Japanese whaling, how journalists from Denmark would cover Creationism in TX schools, how South Korean journalists would report on Argentine environmental policy, etc. etc. There is a rich education in differential perspectives to be had here that should be greatly expanded upon.
And on issues that transcend international relations, where every country's elite has an interest in lying to you - e.g., the recent revelations about tens of trillions of dollars from all around the world being hidden in island tax shelters - that's where professional organizations like the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) that broke that story come into play, or even guerrilla journalism / citizen intelligence-gathering by groups like Wikileaks and Anonymous. In other words, we have all the materials we need to restore a balanced, robust, highly accountable journalistic ecosystem worldwide - the pieces just need to be assembled in a more interconnected away.
Nations, like individual people, are far more forgiving of their own behavior than of others', so the only way any of us is held accountable and knows if we're being assholes is when someone assertively and constructively calls us out on it. We in the US need a lot more foreign coverage of our domestic affairs offered to us, not because the US is inferior and needs to be tutored by other countries, but because all countries need greater exposure to external perspectives, and big countries like the US (and China) that will naturally tend to look inward need it more than most.
We need to regularly see events in this country interpreted through the eyes of countries with strong social democracies, that contrast so sharply with our economic inequality and corporate dictatorship over our daily lives. We need to see the paranoia and wretched greed we're forced to deal with through the eyes of people from countries that are truly violent, chaotic, and deprived, and yet who have still managed to find common interests with their fellow citizens. We need to see our arrogant, conservative Culture Warrior drug laws covered through the eyes of Mexican journalists who see their ugliest ground-floor consequences in piles of corpses.
But it isn't just us. India and China need to see their industrial growth from the perspective of countries being ravaged by climate change. Germany needs to see coverage of its vaunted economic policies through the eyes of people who experience the austerity they've imposed on other countries. Obviously mere diplomacy just doesn't cut it, so maybe "news exchange" can. Show every country on Earth through the eyes of every other country capable of offering a constructive perspective, and the good, honorable people of each will be motivated to do better.
Granted, there will always be a substantial contingent of every society that ignores or resents external input, but those people never have been and never will be part of any solution, so they could sneer and snarl all they want - it would not change anything, or stop anyone else from benefiting. Everyone else would come closer to together, respecting differences and yet assertively calling out what is unacceptable; drawing strength from each other, and globally crowdsourcing the task of discrediting the common enemies of humanity in every society.