to anyone paying attention, the ‘media’ lost credibility 30 years ago at least.
It all depends on what you describe as "paying attention".
The revolution against the Mediacracy may have suffered a setback, but it continues.
This has been an information war, at its heart.
Discrediting the old Media is a huge victory.
That’s probably about when it started for me. Their credibiliy was totally destroyed for me in the Spring of 2000 when the Cincinnati riots were well covered here on FR, but were largely ignored by the national media. The extent of how badly we were being lied to by omission became clear to me at that point.
Interestingly, I had lunch with a new acquaintance yesterday, and this subject came up. He happened to have lived in Cincy for a while, moving there shortly after the riots. He didn’t realize that most of the country didn’t know about them, as they were well known locally. He already lent no credibility to the media, this just further cemented it.