In part, imho, the distrust comes from the the standards of the highest tiers of professional journalists being on a low right now too.
There are some great stats about just how much the number of professional journalists has shrunk in the social media era.
In this context I think it should be termed "now that there are no classified ads."
Here's a thread from January this year, where a journalism professor lays bare the facts about the decline of his domain: https://twitter.com/jeremylittau/status/1088503510184927233?...
If my memory serves me right, that thread was on the HN front page at the time. Essentially the expense of quality journalism was seen as frivolous in the 80's, got nixed, and by the mid-90's newspapers relied on their established captive audience to churn out reliable profits with little appetite for innovation. Who was going to compete with them, anyway?
Internet changed the landscape, and social media has been instrumental in hammering nails in the coffin. But the decline of journalism and destruction of quality newsrooms has been going on since before there was public internet.
As a rule, people don't want to pay for anything that benefits them in a second-order way with non-immediate consequences - even if objectively the benefits are real.
It's a classic economic monkey trap. Holding onto something now is "better" than letting go and getting a bigger benefit later.
Which suggests that perhaps we should be doing more to eliminate monkey traps from our economic and political systems.
Maybe because it’s already a paid service and its quality still has to be observed. But if you take their government from them, returning that substantial income cut, they instantly want it back.
This doesn’t have to invalidate your point, but this particular comparison seems pretty shaky. (Or it’s not and I’m missing something.)
More niche publications don't have that problem, but I think a big question is how we systemically increase the quality of mass journalism.