A legal standard for the word "news"?

Fake news is all over the real news. There's fake news that's completely fabricated, and there's fake news that's opinion claiming to be news, and there's fake news that publishes the lies of others without contradicting them. These things almost certainly turned the 2016 election, and probably affected several before that.

The government can't stop people from saying whatever they want, and rightly so. But could the government put legal limits on the use of the term "news"? We do that in all sorts of other arenas. You can sell all the partially hydrogenated palm oil you want, but you don't get to call it "chocolate"  unless it has at least some minimum cocoa content.

What would those limits look like?

News has to be accurate, at least to some reasonable degree. Outright fabrications must not be allowed, and mistakes must be corrected rapidly, preferably in the same size and context in which they were made.

Opinions are also not news. Opinion discussion should never get the label "news", or at least it should be less than some small defined fraction of the content published under "news" and clearly marked as such.

Quoting or airing the statements of others is also not "news" unless it's fact-checked. If Donald Trump is on CNN telling lies for an hour, it's little different to the public than if Wolf Blitzer was saying the same things. CNN is still putting their name on the content and calling it "news".

Or perhaps we should even include funding sources. Any organization whose funding is directly proportional to the number of subscribers or viewers it has, has a clear motivation to lie to you to keep you interested. Unfortunately that eliminates 95% of news sources. Or is that unfortunate?

Any organization or outlet violating these rules would still be able to publish. They just wouldn't be able to call themselves "news", because they wouldn't be. We would have the "Fox Political Commentary Channel".  Basically, truth in advertising.

Is there some reason this is a bad idea?

Ukraine protests

I'm not an expert on Ukraine, international politics, riots, or really much of anything besides electrical engineering and being a first-class smartypants. But there are some things going on that I find distressing.

The Euromaidan is a series of massive protests and riots that have been going on in Ukraine for two months now. These protests are huge. Overthrow-the-government huge. You see, Ukraine was right on the edge of signing a big agreement with the European Union. At the last minute, they backed off in response to pressure from Russia. Russia wants Ukraine to join a post-Soviet customs union. The current President of Ukraine is pretty much in the back pocket of Vladimir Putin, the strongman running Russia for the last decade.

Since by most polls, the Ukrainian public supports associating with the EU much more than associating with Russia (and really, who wouldn't?), this obviously made lots of people very angry. In response to early protests, the Ukrainian government passed (I use the term loosely) new laws making protest illegal.

So now there are huge protests in Kiev, tens of thousands demanding the resignation of the government. Police are getting more and more violent, including several deaths. I'm starting to have flashbacks of the start of the Syrian civil war. And I seriously doubt that Russia would let an allied despotic government next door be overthrown.

We may be watching the start of a new Russian empire.

Now tell me: have the news sources you follow mentioned any of this? The entire thing is being streamed, live! A catapult built by the protestors had a twitter feed! And CNN's top story was that Lady Gaga was no longer banned in China.

I'm doing a better job reporting than CNN. I wish I could be proud of that. Better information here.