If I were Marc Cuban or Bill Gates

Both of those men have Billions in disposable income. My first step would be to buyout some entity that gave me a routine profit to do what I wanted in my next step.

My second step would be to completely buyout the New York Times company in a completely hostile takeover if necessary. As much as I despise editors who get to chose what stories go where in the paper, I like them even less because they often write shitty mis-leading headlines about the content of the story. Newsflash to newbies: The writer of the story doesn't get to write their headline, editors write the headline.

Why would I buyout the New York Times? I would immediately re-hire the 100? people they recently dumped from their news department and I would re-open permanent bureaus overseas in key cities like: Moscow, Paris, London, Jerusalem, Beirut, Beijing, Tokyo, etc. I would re-hire great reporters who covered those areas back when real news organizations had such bureaus and I would also hire people to be trained under the experts I re-hire.

In short, I would STOP running the freakin news like a business and I would go DEEP into the red if necessary to do so. I would contract with NBC, ABC, or CBS (not Foxsnooze) to get coverage of good investigative peices on the air consistently.

As much as I despise and dislike Couric, her idea of the longer form nightly news is exactly what the country needs, but then we need to expand the nightly news to 45mins-1hour, or eliminate ALL ads from the nightly news so they get the full 30 mins instead of approx. 22mins. That's right folks: for every 30 mins of tv air time, there's a whopping 8 minutes of ads give or take.

I would mandate that we no longer cover stories relating to Hollywood star problems, unless it's a death or a trial of serious social significance. One could argue that the OJ trial, which ridiculous, was an important societal moment that needed to be covered seriously. But, clearly the way it was covered and the time devoted to it's coverage was appalling on SO many levels.

In recent years, all news organizations have been taken over by the stockholders of large companies, and they have proceeded to shit all over them. Taking away valuable, insightful news bureaus that only help broaden the horizons of a self-agrandizing nation, and a nation who is so narcissistic as to not give a whit about the genocide in Rwanda, Kosovo, Chechnya, the Congo, et al.

That is what I would do with $5-$10 billion.