That's a bogus objection that ignores the yawning gap that opened up between perception and reality around the turn of the century, which is the author's point.

As for the argument about there being so such thing as bias-free reporting, you're extrapolating from that to a position of epistemological abdication where you use that narrow fact as a justification for believing whatever you want to believe. While bias is inevitable, it is also to a large extent measurable, and the quality of news reportage can be measured in terms of its predictive power by comparing contemporaneous reports with knowledge gained in hindsight and ranking news sources by their reliability over time.