You are correct.
I've been wrestling with some complex feelings about media's role in the last 5 or 6 years. On one hand, I've been grateful for reporters and producers that would throw daylight at the Trumpsters' lies and myriad outrages. At the same time, every US outlet
except the Huffington Post indulged in a grotesque orgy at the Trump Attention Buffet during (and since) the 2016 campaign, with
CBS's CEO proclaiming "It May Not Be Good for America, but It's Damn Good for CBS". We will never know if Trump would have survived the 2016 Primaries had the rest of the pack followed HuffPost's sensible lead, but I will always wonder just how much of the last four years' miseries must be attributed to media enabling.
The films
Network, and
Broadcast News long ago warned us about media executives' determination to convert News into entertainment. IMO: that push began about 5 minutes after Murrow's takedown of McCarthey, and got a steroid injection about 5 minutes after Nixon boarded Marine One for the last time. To be fair, trustworthiness of the US Press has been an issue from it's very foundations (the play,
The Front Page, or it's better known remake
His Girl Friday are worth viewing), and that's before we even talk about You Provide The Pictures, I'll Provide The War Hearst and his shenanigans.
That said, if you contrast the appearance and competencies of the people in telectronically-distributed media after the early 1980s, you'll find they look and sound a lot less like their predecessors, and a lot more like the kind of characters that you'd expect to find on
Entertainment Tonight.
To be clear: I do
not propose any pruning of the First Amendment, or the protections we have extended the News Vocation. However, we are allowing a stack of wannabe celebrities to help shape our debate, whose goal is less to inform than it is to draw viewership as a vehicle for getting their own show. More than that, we're allowing them to pretend that what they do is good for us.