This blurred line between journalistic reporting and talking-head, tie-wearing "what if" garbage is a societal problem.
People aren't smart enough to tell when they're listening to a journalist or a commentator, period.
When it comes to this topic, I toss two opposite ideas in my head.
Either:
(1) the media is us - that if one were able to add up and average every NPR, Nat. Enquirer rag, Fox/CNN editorial, Vogue mag, Tumblr post, podcast, radio station, house flipping reality TV and all the others that it would be precisely equal to the average of modern humanity in terms of good/bad, decency/foulness, simplicity/nuance, oafishness/sophistication (...) and that if you agree that the media complex is amidst a long nosedive of "lowering the bar," that it isn't the media heads but civilization itself that is primarily to blame. And if we become healthier, so will our media.
OR
(2) Civilization is qualitatively no better/worse than it has ever been (since, e.g., the advent of television), yet the founding forces of big media like television began with high ideals that were mismatched with modern society and the long nosedive of "lowering the bar" is just an inevitable outcome of the sum-of-all-media changing to best reflect its representatives.
In either case, I believe that "we common people" are more primarily to blame than the "media execs." Both options are consistent with that. They just differ on the mechanism to-date and future outlook. I find option #2 much more pessimistic (as it implies our crappiness is innate and - with some qualifiers about 100years being a relatively short experiment on the scale of civilization - maybe we can't as a cumulative unit become any better, so our nosediving media is *necessarily* here to stay).
