I agree that today’s media is largely failing in the task we need them to do. But that doesn’t obviate the need for that task to be done.
However, it’s been so long since it was done correctly that most people have lost the ability to believe it COULD be done. So when they are confronted with a truth they don’t like, they simply dismiss the message by dismissing the messenger.
Remember Joe Friday’s demand: “The facts, maam, just the facts.”
There was a time in which most people couldn’t write their own truth, because they weren’t good enough typists to produce the exacting standards required for a proper reading by others. Those who did that, were typists and journalists, the modern-day “scribes,” whose major function is not to determine truth but replicate a readable copy, that they eventually co-opted to say what they wanted to say, and not what the original author intended.
But now, because of the miracle of word-processors, many more people are capable of composing their own message (thesis) in the manner uniquely authentic to their understanding — which is not the old mediated message of before, which makes everything uniform and seem the same — losing the most important information of those discoveries and insights, which is the manner in which they came to decide upon the truth. That is the most helpful information in thinking about anything — “how” to think and not “what” to think, which is the mass media style of information transmission — but now there is the possibility of an even higher truth.
In the old media way of seeing the world, truth is just what the authority says it is — which can turn out to be entirely arbitrary unless one can trace the methodology by which one came upon their truth. That is the value of original writing — as is being produced by the countless truth-seekerrs in the world today — and not just by one self-designated group of people claiming to be exclusively “objective.”
That has to be determined by each source on a case by case basis, and not simply as a class, because somebody says, “Trust me, I’m a professional manipulator.”