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.