[nathan_compton]

> but as a consumer we can no longer trust them, and probably never should have.

This doesn't follow. I'm not a fan of the mainstream media by any means, but trust is not an all or nothing thing. It is entirely possible to develop a relatively sophisticated relationship with news media and to assign different levels of trust to different elements of what is encountered. Indeed, one might even vary their level of trust on a sentence by sentence basis!

The idea that the media must be entirely correct and entirely unbiased is jejune. It isn't the world we live in, has never been the world we live in. Take a little epistemological responsibility.