First, I would strongly disagree with the idea that pre-Internet media reserved political leanings to opinion pieces and editorials. In fact, one of the best assignments I had in college was to watch the presidential debate between George Bush and Bill Clinton and write two papers: One fact-based news article (everything in it must be true) that was slanted for Bush and one that followed the same rules and was slanted for Clinton.
They may not have been the full-on cheerleading sections we see from the left-media and the right-media today, but they certainly wrote for an audience.
Second, I would say that the solution is not in the hands of the government (which wouldn't be trusted) and is not in the hands of journalists (with the few who might stand on integrity having their voices muted in a sea of media companies chasing the almighty dollar).
The best solution lies in the hands of big tech, who have thus far exasperated the problem by creating bubbles of confirmation bias around social media (and other) consumers -- again, in the chase for the almighty dollar.
History can be mapped via moves toward the extreme followed by moves towards the middle followed by moves back to the extreme. The big difference now is that confirmation bias that is keeping people at the extremes even after events should have shaken them back to the middle.
While the fight against confirmation bias may be a losing battle -- we've seen time and time again how people will believe their politician more than a doctor, scientist, family or friend -- the only way to combat it is with a source of truth.
It can't come from the government as it would never be trusted. It's likely that it will never be trusted no matter how it materializes. Anything that disagrees with Opinion must be Slanted tends to be the mantra of people locked into confirmation bias. But given that it is our best hope to fight misinformation and the oncoming storm of deep fakes that will make what we have now look minor by comparison is to build a source of truth.
The idea for this source of truth is actually relatively simple: a tool that can be pointed at a news article that will report where it is biased and how much it is biased. This tool should be the offshoot of a non-profit media company that both opens it up to the public and uses it internally on all articles published to ensure that what they are presenting in articles is actually fact-based and non-biased in presentation.
We live in an age where this is actually a possibility. I say the idea for this is simple, but obviously the execution is difficult. However, it presents a path that helps eliminate the bias of the journalist.
The explosion of AI makes this a real possibility. Not only can it be trained on bias in journalism, it can be trained on linguistics and the understanding of how certain words play into bias.
Last, the sad truth is that such a venture would be expensive and doesn't have a profitable outcome for big tech. While most companies like to be charitable, this charity also tends to be an outreach of PR. Apple might pride itself on protecting privacy, but this is their advertisement. Google once had the motto of 'Do No Evil', but that didn't stop them from scraping websites to repurpose the content in a way that kept users on search pages rather than reading the source. Companies are about money.
But the government would never be trusted, and the media industry is driven by capitalistic desire.
If the truth could actually make money... well, we wouldn't be in this mess in the first place.