Debunking Bad Journalism and the Last Mile Problem

There are some great blogs out there that regularly take on a piece of bad reporting and pull it to pieces, often they focus on their own particular sphere of expertise, such as Ben Goldacre's BadScience.net.
However most of these blogs, forums and other 'Amateur Journalism Police' efforts run into what I call the Last Mile Problem, and that Last Mile is the distance from the offending article to their blog.

Can we counter bad journalism through debunking articles under the nose of the consumer?

What I envision is a browser plugin which allows users to tap into a crowd sourced discussion of the facts in an article. This plugin not only provides context when you read an article, but also allows you to tag things you think are wrong, and then connects you to a community where you can interact with others passionate about that topic to collaborate and work through finding and reporting back the truth of the matter.

This plugin would need to enable the following:

• Atomic quoting of parts of the article, so that you can precisely deconstruct the problems with it.
• Ability to cite in counterarguments and proof of what is wrong.
• Ability to discuss the topic beyond the article itself, such as delving into the sources cited (probably through a discussion community)
• A robust discussion to avoid Wikiality level of truth, with all work proven and cited
• Provide an in-article level of context to the reader as to it's reliability, the amount of discussion it's generated or even marking individual facts under discussion with color coding to show how 'true' they are.

The discussion system would need to provide systematic focus on the difference between Fact and Opinion, but allow for the inclusion of both. By bringing together all of the modern developments in both forum and commenting software, such has been discussed in the Knight-Mozilla MoJo challenge, I think something truly effective could result.

The plugin is the tool, but the collaborative discussion is the goal; I hope that a community could build up a Semantic Web of metadata over time. This metadata would gain great depth of reliability through Eigenfactor-like webs of trust leading all the way up from proven science in respectable journals to the quoted snippets in journalistic articles. Clouds of articles, proof trees and links would form around topics, and each new article that is published can be assimilated into the collected knowledge.
Then any kind of user can connect in to find out what is real and what is fake - like an upgraded Wikipedia that you consume with your news.


This gets the controversy in front of the reader at the time of consumption, and it subverts the bad journalism coming out of some publications which degrade trust in the whole media industry.