Misinformation does not discredit democracy, it discredits the state apparatus that either allows- or conducts- the misinformation.
we don’t agree on this for a variety of reasons, so i just reject the premise here and what follows from it.
So then I would again ask, who do you think should determine what kind of journalism is ‘needed’?
i’m pretty content to trust journalism as a collective institution to produce the sort of necessary journalism for a healthy civic society—it’s been doing just that for a long time even in the absence of the readership to financially support it. (things like ProPublica would not exist if journalism was incapable of doing this from within)