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Notes -
Agreed. The mainstream media is a joke - even "reputable" institutions like the NYT have very little interest in providing balanced coverage of things. What interest exists is generally from an older generation of journalists, who are aging out and being replaced by young zealous partisans. And by and large, people not only have no interest in fixing it, they don't even have interest in seeing the problem! See smug slogans like "reality has a liberal bias" - that sort of attitude is just not indicative of genuine intellectual honesty and willingness to see things from other points of view.
In fairness there were libertarians in the economics department where I went to college, so that does happen some of the time. I don't know how often, but it does at least seem that some academics do come out the way you describe.
And this is why those old institutions are no longer trusted by anyone under 50. Nobody under 50 cites a story on the NYT website as a truth claim, because they have known since they began to understand the concept of bias in reporting that NYT and similar news sites are Cathedral sources and will push The Narrative. Getting that trust back would obviously require admitting it, fixing it, cleaning house to prevent it, and begin writing the news as it’s actually happening and not twisting it.
That’s what rebuilding trust is — until tge problems that caused the lack of trust are dealt with, trust is gone.
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