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Blaming the media for one's own bad decisions is a cop-out at best and rank cowardice at worst. No one made you do it.

There has been a long-term effort to delegitimize the media, academia, most public institutions, and [obviously] the government/politicians over several decades now.
 
It's easy to do. You don't have to be right. You don't have to offer a compelling message. You don't have to be consistent and non-hypocritical yourself. You don't have to be virtuous. All you have to do is point out when they're wrong, hypocritical, etc, any time it's spotted. And with ANY large institution, you'll find countless examples of it. 

If you keep doing it, eventually nobody trusts anything, and you've won. Because they will look to anyone who is NOT a part of that group as independent and trustworthy, so simply by virtue of being outside the establishment you have a ready and willing audience for whatever you want to peddle. 

Ideally people would seek out multiple sources of information and come to their own conclusions without the influence of media bias.

But that's not how the world works now, and it's not how the world has EVER worked.

Exactly. People, or "the masses" as OAM might say, have a desire to be led. 

So the person most effective at tearing down "the media" becomes a de facto leader.  

I don't disagree, but for the MSM at least, it's largely their own fault, for pandering to one political side or the other.  Every time they get caught out either pushing a questionable agenda or outright lying, which has happened fairly frequently over the past couple of decades, they're the ones who are at fault for delegitimizing their own establishment.

But that's the problem. "The MSM" isn't A thing. It's a collection of individuals. A LARGE collection, over a span of decades. 

Imagine if we tried to delegitimize college football as an institution based on the various times we've shown that coaches/programs cheated, or acted contrary to ethical or moral grounds, or lied about how they were all-in with an institution only to leave for a different program the next week. 

We have DECADES of college football examples of all of these things. But we're college football fans. So we overlook it and point to the bad apples as bad apples and to the liars as liars. Someone on the opposite side, who perhaps considers colleges sponsoring football programs to be ridiculous and inconsistent with the goals of higher education will point to those same examples as evidence of systemic rot and say the institution itself is corrupt. 

We've done it with the MSM, because we catch some of them in lies/duplicity/hypocrisy. We've done it with politicians, because we catch some of them in crimes/graft/hypocrisy. We've done it with religion, i.e. Jim & Tammy Faye and the televangelists, the Catholic Church, etc. We've done it with business, i.e. Enron, Worldcom, etc. 

You give me any large institution, over a period of two+ decades, and I can destroy trust in it. Wouldn't even be hard. All it takes is a concerted effort to find cracks and exploit every single one of them as loudly as I can, until the world believes that surface aberrations are evidence of structural unsoundness. 

I don't disagree, but for the MSM at least, it's largely their own fault, for pandering to one political side or the other.  Every time they get caught out either pushing a questionable agenda or outright lying, which has happened fairly frequently over the past couple of decades, they're the ones who are at fault for delegitimizing their own establishment.

I don't think that's exactly the case. Political forces have worked for a long time to erode that. And once you plant the idea "that institution is out to get you," any missteps reinforce the belief. With millions of stories per day, there will be missteps. With the fact that newspapers and TV channels would run quotes from randos on the street and newspapers always had a mess of opinion writers one wouldn't like, it became easy to find those moments. 

Throw in the psychology of remembering the bad and not the mundane, and the capitalistic opportunities to either capture a more opinionated audience or siphon an audience by tearing something else down, and it was fait accompli. The only way the MSM could have held onto that illusion of legitimacy would be thousands of outlets being near-perfect on millions of pieces daily, and in a world where we can see it all, that was always going to come down.

(Not to mention, agenda pushing and such are part of the history of media. A lot of papers were founded with pushing an interest in mind. The Chicago trib was basically founded to push one party. People just bought into a certain kind of idealism for a while)

(Not to mention, agenda pushing and such are part of the history of media. A lot of papers were founded with pushing an interest in mind. The Chicago trib was basically founded to push one party. People just bought into a certain kind of idealism for a while)

The wife and I visited Hearst Castle a few years back. I knew of William Randolph Hearst from AP US History classes, but didn't really KNOW of his history in any sort of real detail. 

It spurred me to read The Chief, his biography. 

Highly recommend it. It's fascinating. 

And that Ronnie Reagan quote is one of the best all-time.  That's the last great president the USA ever had.

His trickle down economics didn't help the working class,charming though he was

I don't think that's exactly the case. Political forces have worked for a long time to erode that. And once you plant the idea "that institution is out to get you," any missteps reinforce the belief. W

They've been active, driving forces in the race to the bottom, for the sake of eyeballs/clicks/profits.  This is a situation of their own making.  I shed no tears for them, but I weep for America.

(not really, I'm not that dramatic about it, it just sounded like a fun thing to write)

Back in the day, newspapers were nearly all clearly partisan.  Candidates didn't campaign, generally, the newspapers did it for them.  A read up on the election of 1876 was edifying for me, much what was, is today, and vice versa.