Media has nothing to do with it. There are two primary reasons for the dismal view of academia:
1.) Universities that suck on the public teat, producing little more than dreck, and which induce youngsters to take on lifelong loans for the sole purpose of Marxist indoctrination in place of learning skills and knowledge necessary for the student to become a productive citizens.
2.) Fake and fraudulent “science”:
A.) Fake climate “science”
B.) Fake nutritional “science”
C.) Fake cosmology “science” that says life is nothing more than a temporary pocket of negative entropy.
On target, but don’t forget
Fake Keynesian “economics” in which there is no scarcity nor day of reckoning for a rogue state.
About 80 percent of economists at prestigious universities are technicians without a clue about how the world really works. They go through life with blinders on.
About 80 percent of economists at backwater universities have at least a clue about how the world really works.
Problem is, almost all of the academic journals and publishing houses are controlled by the first 80 percent rather than the second.