Remove economic incentives from news media, perhaps. You'd think news-organizations-as-charities would work, but even being donation-driven still incentivizes populist pandering at the expense of real journalism.

We need something that is to current journalism as the Senate is to the House: unable to be blown around by society's ephemeral tastes.

The simplest method is probably to pay for journalism through taxes. The BBC is a decent model. Ideally we'd want to retain a multiplicity of viewpoints, though. Maybe a BBC-alike as a grant-funding organization, where small independent journalist groups get grants to go out and investigate, in exchange for an agreement to publish their stories onto the BBC-alike's news wire service (which would then be freely licensed to distributors—basically putting those stories into the public domain.)

Rather than the BBC-alike deciding who to hire, let a Journalist's Guild decide who's good enough to publish; anyone allowed into the profession will be trusted to have done something valuable whenever they submit a story, and will be automatically paid out. It's the Guild's responsibility (i.e. that of the other Guild members) to catch their peers submitting nonsense and report them, and have those people's journalistic credentials suspended or disbar them entirely.

That'd neatly realign the concept of "journalistic integrity" or "journalistic ethics" to stand at the same strength-of-force on journalists as the equivalent concepts in medicine and law do for their professionals.

That's it, but I'm out of ideas how to do it. Charities are not good enough; you need to disconnect the incentives for writing the stories from how readers like them. News, after all, is about observable reality so it shouldn't be affected by the moods of the society.

Yeah, BBC may be a step in the right direction. The grant-funding organization idea is interesting. Or maybe the reverse? Let's make news just like a public agency - collecting data (stories) and releasing it as a public service, just like NOAA does with weather? But then again, we'd need a way to incentivize the reporters to dig into government/whoever-funds-this problems and make sure that such reports get published as well.

It's a hard problem, and alternative solutions won't be perfect either, but the current situation of constant outrage-fueled brainwashing is taking a heavy toll on the ability of our society to reason, so IMO it's worth considering a change.

BTW. I think that a regular change of such systems may not be a bad idea. The problem with media, or with justice, or democracy, or even with markets start when they're getting too optimized, and thus start to deviate from the original purpose. So i.e. if you look at the arguments about why democracy is awesome and all, they all seem to make sense... if applied to the system from 100 years ago, back when it wasn't so thoroughly gamed. We want our systems efficient, but not too efficient, because they're not perfectly aligned with our shared values.

Presumably this pandering is less effective on people that have the sort of education being talked about here. (if not I'm not sure I agree that such education is a worthwhile goal).

So why are you so certain that the problem starts with the media?