Ive got no problem shitting on CNN, but you sort of begin to lose credibility if you think infowars, rebel media or fox news are the trustworthy alternatives.
They all have different markets, which is the important thing to pay attention too. I think it is a general rule that any market-driven media is going to be little more than what gets people to consume it. CNN is trying for a general market, so they use tabloid tactics. Fox focuses specifically on grabbing the conservative market, so they have to spin everything to fit the mood of the conservative movement. You can grab any major market network and do the same sort of math.
Hence why BBC tends to be brought up so much as the standard. BBC is state funded and therefore doesn't have the profit motive (even NPR and PBS, America's public media, rely largely on donations and therefore have to cater to their donors). Considering that Britain is a decently functioning liberal society, the state doesn't abuse their media arm in the same way that a dictatorship would.
It is important too, I think, that we remember that the current state of the media is the norm for the United States, and the stuff we look back nostalgically at is the exception. Back in the newspaper days, the media was ridiculously partisan to the point that Breitbart is almost a return home rather than a radical step outside the norm. There is a period, starting with radio and ending with cable, when media became more "Honorable" because the nature of the medium reduced the effect of market forces, since there was limited space for broadcast media to operate and they didn't have to compete quite as hard. With their market shares sort of inevitable, they could afford to nurture journalism, as opposed to CNN or Fox, where journalism would either bore or offend their respectful markets.
So going back to where we started, the best media sources are naturally going to be well-funded public media allowed to act independently of the state, or those few basic agencies that have cornered the neutral news market and peddle primarily on reputation, which is, like, Reuters and AP basically. With everything else you gotta figure their main concern is catering to an audience and any honest journalism that comes out of that rises accidentally.
The internet, of course, has propelled the market problem way the fuck out of proportion. Journalism takes shit loads of effort, but throwing up a video of your face making ideological arguments is easy as fuck, as is making an unsourced infograph. And since doing either of these things is incredibly effective on the internet, we're starting to see memes legitimately replace some of the market functions of the news, which is all kinds of fucking bizarre.
