After the fallout from the 2016 election in the U.S. it was pointed out the the media had played a HUGE role in swaying peoples minds, and votes. As fake and click-bait headlines rose to the front page it left many uncertain about the future of honest journalism. Politics aside, it should be of at least some major concern what is said as "true fact" and ones ability to separate misinformation from genuine fact. As an Asgardian who would love to see honest journalism, along with the entertaining satire of outlets like "The Onion" I find it terribly frightening that misinformation, and pure sensationalism could find it's way into such a pure movement.

We have all seen the countlessly disproven, and frankly infuriating articles posted time, and time again on the now closed Facebook group pages; spam-like titles include "Free infinite energy! Look at my design," "Produce fuel with no input!," and yet, as far as fact, and science prove, perpetual motion is nothing more than an impossible dream. However, I am not saying that genuine vetted research into the endeavor is a lost cause, after all, the quackery of Alchemy morphed into the science of chemistry.

But, I digress.

What I want to see, as an Asgardian, who will look daily to the news brought to me by Asgardian outlets, is honest, clean journalism without sad lies, and incredulous wording. I understand that both good, and bad websites make income by ad revenue brought in by visitors to their online articles, but it is my hope that, with our own system, so young in development we can design the infrastructure and backbone to support honest, clean journalism that will survive as long as Asgardia does.

I think we need independent and transparent journalism. At least I don't see any other options to truly hear what's on peoples minds, even thou they might be disturbing. And even if the information provided from the journalism would be falsely made, it is important us to know, that these people have this kinds of opinions.

If we could maintain this kind of open minded flow of information, where u can be stupid or embarrassing without judgement, we will be more informed about our citizens minds and the culture of the people.

Or course there will be technical problems; Asgardia is only just developing, so not everyone has the same amount of the official information, so the Ascardia officials could create a ratification or a signature, when the Ascardia Officials have fact-checked the information witch have been published.

"honest, clean journalism" is subjective. Lets think about all the scientific documents that state that two objects of the same mass fall at the same speed..yada...yada. Its a lie. At the time of publication it was believed to be true yet later was found to be not true (unless in a vacuum). There are more forms of journalism than when I was born and will continue to grow as we as a race grow and learn. "The facts is not always the facts." Having said that, yes, we should strive to report and journal to the best of our ability with the only "restriction" being that we freely and without hesitation publish corrections or retractions immediately. Asgardia is about the future, therefor, we can not, in my opinion, cripple ourselves with current ways and means. Use what we know and have, yes. Keep an eye turned to the new and to-be-tried, YES!

Simple things will help. All news should have the sources properly referenced and linked, not just another story that relates to it.

The Register tech news site was one of the few places I could get a balanced view of the UK referendum last year, because they had some well written articles about the repercussions of leaving the EU, from both the leave and remain camps. Both agreed on the important things, that the future is uncertain and shaky either way. and that either way the UK Gov should have some sort of plan.

I want my news media to avoid knee-jerk reactions, and present 2 or more sides to any story, because in real life there are more than 2 sides to a story, but it is not convenient to package.

I currently do a weekly tech-news show on my local radio station, and post all the links to all the stories I reference before the show, and often with multiple links if the story seems to vary across the sources. On my show we discuss some of the stories in more depth, but then we delve into opinion, and try to make it clear that we are now relating to the story from a personal point of view. We try to do this so that the news item has some context, often not in the story.

The distinction between personal opinion or allegiance, and raw dry facts should be clearly made, and every effort to put facts and data into context.

Modern journalism seems to suffer from bad use of Venn diagrams, where if you are not in this circle, you must be in the other, because they forget that Venn diagrams are supposed to overlap.

I get a lot of my tech news from watching/listening to Twit.tv as they have something no other TV channel dare do. The Twit chat-rooms are full of nerdy people ready and prepared to fact-check and argue with the current live topic. This leads to stories being corrected live as you watch. Their journalists often bow to the superior hive-mind busy at work in the background, and are thankful for being corrected. Between shows the cameras keep rolling, and the public get to see the presenters being real people. This adds a useful trust factor because you hear all the "off the record" comments and get to know how the presenter really feels about a topic.

The Twit.tv model of transparency is perfect for the modern era of streaming media.

My belief is that freedom of expression should be imperative in Asgardia, with the singular limit to free speech being that you can't break the law. For example, you cannot start shouting "fire" in a crowded concert; you would probably get many people killed in a stampede. Journalists in Canada, where I'm from, are subject to laws about "fair and balanced" reporting. This is how I feel we could start on the subject of where regulations on journalism should exist, if any. As with any trade or business, I feel that journalists are being entrusted by the public to explain the news in a manner that is backed by credible evidence, confirmed by a source or witness, and that is in no way government-run or government-sponsored.