“They used to hide their bias better, layering it, making it less noticeable, or at the very least debatable regarding their true intentions. There was slightly more nuance, but that’s over.”
I have been saying this for many years, IMHO, it started after the Republican revolution in the 1994 election which Newt Gingrich engineered.
The old dominant Media knew they had become less effective. They started trading credibility for short term political gains, such as getting Clinton re-elected and stopping the Republican agenda put forward by Gingrich.
Eventually, even though it took 30 years, they ran out of credibility. A significant majority of the public no longer believes them. The outright lying got to the point they could not hide it. Alternative media became big enough people could find it in spite of the censorship.
Election Night 1994 was truly one for the ages. I still gleefully recall the media talking heads consoling one another, trying to figure out what went wrong.
I thought it was when Walter Cronkite lied about Tet in 1968.
I asked a friend, in his nineties about the subject, thinking in the days of Edward R. Murrow the news was reported without bias.
He laughed and said it was almost as bad then.
I have a complete collection of bound Harpers magazines from the first one in the 1840s to 1910.
I stopped with 1910 as their format changed to a lot of fluff and obvious leftist bias began to appear.