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?

Presidential elections with proportional allocation

The electoral college is getting a lot of flack lately for being why Trump won the election. It occurred to me that the EC, as it is popularly understood, has two effects. One weights smaller states more than larger ones, which was just a pragmatic political compromise from the 1780s. But the other is winner-take-all, which is a choice the state governments make. They could give their electoral votes literally any way they want, including rolling a D20 and picking people out of the jury pool.

I decided to strip out the winner-take-all and see what would have happened if all the states used proportional allocation while retaining the constitutional weighting process. The results for the last seven elections:

Clinton: 236

Bush: 197

Perot: 105

Clinton: 267

Dole: 224

Perot: 46

Nader: 1 (California)

Bush: 263

Gore: 262

Nader: 13

Bush: 280

Kerry: 258

Obama: 289

McCain: 248

Nader: 1 (California)

Obama: 276

Romney: 261

Johnson: 1 (California)

Trump: 262
Hillary: 260
Johnson: 14
Stein: 1 (California)
McMullin: 1 (Utah)

Interestingly, four of the seven end up without a majority winner, and the others ('04, '08, '12) have very close margins. This shows that the winner-take-all effect is just as important as the constitutionally-mandated weighting effect.

In 2016, Trump still comes out on top due to the weighting, but with proportional allocation it's almost a tie, and nobody has a majority with 270. The numbers are strikingly close to 2000, actually, the last time there was a popular/electoral split.

Normally that would mean the election goes to the House, but I don't think that's what actually happens in these scenarios. The third-party electors, knowing their candidates can't possibly win, would likely throw their votes to either of the leading candidates. This would likely happen after extracting concessions of some kind, like promises of legislative priorities, or even a different VP. We could end up with a Hillary/Johnson administration, or a Kaine/Pence, or literally anything the electors could compromise on. It looks very much like a parliamentary system.

Suddenly third party votes are something besides a not-vote!

At a glance, I rather like the shape of this system. I've got no problem with weighting rural areas more than urban areas. I just have a problem with making votes not matter at all. And that's not the result of electoral college as a concept, it's entirely a state-level choice.

[Also, side note, Maine and Nebraska use some bizarre hybrid system. Two EVs to the state winner, and one to the winner of each congressional district. So you could imagine proportional for the entire state, or just proportional for the at-large votes.

In 2016, Maine went 3:1 Hillary, but goes 2:2 under either proportional plan. Nebraska went 5:0 Trump, but goes 4:1 under proportional at-large, and 3:2 under straight proportional. So the gerrymandering of the districts to favor Republicans in Nebraska keeps having an effect if we still go by congressional districts. Screw gerrymandering.]

In summary, the problems with the electoral college aren't with the electoral college. Your beef is with your state legislature, as it often is.