[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.