The problem is that news media were relatively well funded organisations from the days of printed news media and later tv. They had muscle, so they could withstand legal repercussions from corporations or even countries who tried to silence them through lawsuits.

There are still plenty of good journalists around, and many have find ways to make a career through the internet in various ways, but if they don't have a resourceful organisation watching their back, they are much more vulnerable to being silenced or suppressed by rich and powerful entities.

I hope so. There are some fantastic independent news channels in my country which I feel provide unbiased news. But corporate sponsored media, even CNN, are heavily pushing an agenda which has become very obvious since corona happened.

The problem with this line of thinking is that it leans on the 'things will always get better' mantra.

This is my personal experience with that: I am 62 years old now, twenty years old when Reagan was elected. Prior to that there was much hope and promise with 'work hard and you will get ahead', 'Year by year your income will increase, you will go from renting an apartment to owning a home', 'there is always a better job around the corner', etc. etc.

Then Reagan came in and killed the 'Fairness Doctrine'

https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/955/fairness-doctrine

Then FOX news became a thing, and it's been downhill ever since. Americans still believe they have a television (or print media) that mostly tells the truth, yet that hasn't been the case for many years now.

So on one side you have people that dig deep to find the truth, recognize propaganda when they see it, take the time to do fact checking to make sure their news sources are consistently telling the truth. etc. etc.

So while those who dig deep see a constant degradation in quality of living, wages, costs of living, education and health care the majority of Americans live in a bubble of misinformation, although more and more of them are beginning to question what is told in the news media vs. their own personal experiences with family, friends, co-workers.

I have been waiting for 'things to get better' since Reagan occupied the office. It has steadily gone hill ever since then with no reversal of course, and in some cases making sudden lurches into worse conditions than I had thought imaginable.

Lulling oneself into a false sense of security helps no one. Taking the time to become aware of how dangerous does more harm than good, best to rip off the bandaid, learn to seperate truth from fiction and figure out how you are going to react to the reality of where we are, whether that's to become more involved with local or national politics or start making plans to expatriate to another country with better standards of living, income, health care and education.

Are there? Look at twitter, let's say you're-

pro Musk-it takes a billionaire to buy a platform and "free" it from distortion out of the goodness of his heart.

Anti Musk- any billionaire can buy any media company and distort it to his and other billionaires interests.

In either situation, the prospect of a free and critical media is fucked.

> It’s not dead, but it has been resting.

Naw, it's dead. When I visited the U.K. in the 1990's, I was struck at how different and politicized their mainstream news was compared to the United States. I was grateful for the objectivity we had in most American news outlets by comparison. Then, all of that started to change around 9/11 and the Bush years...and any objectivity completely went away during the Trump years. Now, our news media is far worse than what I remember about the U.K. 30 years ago. Journalism in England never got better, and I don't expect it to get better in the U.S. now either.