It's a difficult problem, admittedly. And as an unregulated private-sector entity, they are legally free to establish any policies they want. But I think they need to consider that they are one of the main ways for people to put out important information in video form, and it isn't just established media companies who are doing this, and put some effort into figuring out how to do better. I doubt they're even looking at this problem. I can't say I have a solution either (then again it's not my job), but one thought I have is that they could allow people to mark their channels as belonging to one of a handful of categories like "journalism", "advertising", "humor", "personal", and so on. "Personal" would be the default, and the only one that is free of charge. For a journalism channel, you'd have to pay a modest fee either as a monthly subscription or for each video posted, identity would have to be verified, and YT would need to have a complaint review process that involved a reasonably intelligent, reasonably unbiased human looking at the video and its content in that channel and deciding whether there was anything unacceptable about it. Over time they would also take the history of the channel and the history of the complainer into account; a complaint from someone with a history of invalid complaints against a channel that has been found to be high-quality could probably be ignored. Does this scale? It depends how easy and how costly it is to have a journalism channel, among other things, and what the thresholds are for trusting a channel or a complainer, how a channel or complainer can lose trust, etc. There will also be language issues, of course, so journalism channels might only be available in languages that are supported by YT's staff. There won't be a perfect solution to this, but something along these lines could be a lot better than what they do now. Automation simply can't solve this problem.