[tablespoon]

> Instead of constantly hand-wringing about "disinformation" from the shadows, they should be desperately addressing their own plummeting credibility: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/gallup-american-trus...

Quoth your link "The shift coincided with the era of Donald Trump’s presidency, when trust in the media was often juxtaposed with trust in Trump’s presidency."

The problem the media has is that it can't please everyone's biases. If it's appropriately skeptical of Trump, the people who hate to see Trump criticized will be unhappy (and in that case there's an ideological media alternate universe willing to capitalize on that unhappiness and turn it into mistrust). If it becomes a Trump love-fest with either muted skepticism (e.g. Fox News) or hardly any at all (e.g. OANN), then a lot of people with mistrust it (because it's arguably not doing its job).

It's a lot like Congress, actually. People mistrust "Congress" but usually like their Congressman. That's because their Congressmen likely to be ideologically similar, while "Congress" as a whole has people who are very different ideologically (and it may be controlled by those people). And to top that off, the electoral strategies of both parties often play up fear and mistrust of the other side in order to drum up votes (which unarguably helps the candidates most of the time, but hurts the institution).

[makomk]

No, more than that. The problem the media has is that it wasn't enough to merely be sceptical of Trump or to oppose him based on what he actually did; in order to be sufficiently anti-Trump you needed to believe an endless cavalcade of things that weren't true.

Arguably the dying gasp of the New York Times' attempt to do actual reporting and not anti-Trump activism involved a particularly stupid conspiracy theory about Trump secretly communicating with Russia and (for some reason) a medical clinic in Florida using the timing of DNS requests for a mail server. This made no sense on any level; neither Trump nor anyone in his circles controlled the mail server or its DNS, they were behind so many levels of subcontracting he'd have to involve a bunch of people he had no reason to trust and who all denied any such thing happened, all to set up a communication channel so poor he'd need some other, undetected, much better communication channel to get any meaning out of it and that was tied to the Trump brand for no good reason. And this was supposed to be a better explanation than other mail systems which had received promotional hotel e-mails merely doing automated DNS requests as a result, like many e-mail systems do.

So naturally, the Clinton campaign demanded the FBI investigate this in a way that implied they were somehow supporting Trump if they didn't, and went massively viral on social media with this demand. The New York Times pushed back against this in the mildest way possible, by saying that the FBI had looked into these claims and concluded all the evidence was consistent with normal email systems doing ordinary things in response to marketing emails. (This was also what nearly every technical expert seems to have concluded regardless of party.) Then a year or later someone dug this up and kicked off a massive backlash against the Times, with a campaign to cancel subscriptions over this supposedly pro-Trump article and their own public editor turning on them over it. They capitulated, apologised, and promised not to do it again. From then on they'd consistently go along with conspiracy theories and misinformation done in the name of fighting Trump.

[tablespoon]

> Arguably the dying gasp of the New York Times' attempt to do actual reporting and not anti-Trump activism involved a particularly stupid conspiracy theory about Trump secretly communicating with Russia and (for some reason) a medical clinic in Florida using the timing of DNS requests for a mail server.

Do you have an actual link to that?

Another problem is that some people have the mistaken idea that the media should never ever publish a wrong fact, and if it does it's proof that it's broken. The media (or most of it) has to make tradeoffs between (for lack of a better term) future-historical accuracy, timeliness, and some other things. That means sometimes (maybe even often) it will publish something that turns out to be wrong, because if it didn't it would never publish anything that was timely.

> Then a year or later someone dug this up and kicked off a massive backlash against the Times, with a campaign to cancel subscriptions over this supposedly pro-Trump article and their own public editor turning on them over it. They capitulated, apologised, and promised not to do it again. From then on they'd consistently go along with conspiracy theories and misinformation done in the name of fighting Trump.

Maybe, to make my point more explicitly: the main issue with the media nowadays seems to be many of the people who consume it. And frankly, most criticism of the media's trustworthiness that I see online is the kind that will only make whatever problem that's being complained about worse.