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To add to this, I can confirm that this is not just an opinion they're projecting outwards, I've heard high ranking industry professionals despair to a room of colleagues as to what they should do about the "misinformation" problem. They truly believe that the public is turning away from their trustworthy news because they're not as comforting as misinformation.
And those in that industry I've personally interacted with, yes, probably do take their ethics and integrity seriously. The reason they don't get a pass is something I've touched a couple of times here.
Even if one journalist, multiple journalists or even a majority of them, are hardworking and try hard to report the truth, my observation is that as a group they are unwilling to push back against the large contingent of liars and frauds in their profession. And I don't mean "the evil and bad right wing journalists that write misinformation", I mean their own in-group. When outsiders push against them the wagons circle and end up pointing in a predictable direction, leading me to believe there is a tacit endorsement of the bad aspects. Journalists cannot afford in-group loyalty with their peers. As Scott wrote, yes, genuinely criticizing the in-group is excruciatingly painful, but that is precisely what the public expects journalism school to train journalists to be able to do.
As long as the profession as those serious journalists don't start publically cleaning up their profession, the public has no reason to trust them.
I'd agree with this, but I'd also extend slightly more charity, in noting that part of journalism is taking a large amount of information and reducing it down to the most important parts, trimming out more irrelevant bits. And human beings being what we are, it's not unexpected to have some bias creep in — even if unconsciously, and even if one is trying to be even-handed — toward omitting "unflattering" elements for your side. Now, consider what happens when this is repeated as a story passes through multiple layers (see also the usual complaints about science journalism and what the nuanced conclusions of journal papers end up reduced to at the end of the journalistic "game of telephone"). You get something like the top portion of this infographic from our own @mitigatedchaos.
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