Problem being: opinion pieces are cheap and very entertaining if your audience agrees with you. Investigative journalism is expensive and can be boring, not to mention potentially bad for ad revenue.

If that was the actual cause, you'd expect to see surging demand for sources offering better reporting, but that's obviously not what's happening. Instead, the fall in trust in traditional media coincides with a rise in popularity of alternative sources of information that are objectively less trustworthy, less accurate, and less interested in unbiased reporting.

I think there's definitely an argument to be made that the New York Times or CNN aren't great at the whole reporting thing (although I suspect I'd make a different argument than you would), but I don't buy that's why trust in them is going down if the alternatives people are turning to are Breitbart and a Blue Lives Matter Facebook group. People don't want less activism and more reporting, they just want activism they agree with.

Activism is a side effect. Newspapers compete for clicks and eyeballs, so they need massive amounts of content. And who could be the cheapest producer of content without any ambition of owning it? A person with religious belief in self-righteousness, who's doing it not for raising their own blog's ad revenue, but for pushing something they believe in onto the masses.

Now get 2 competing camps of such people, weaponize them against each other by providing outreach, and enjoy your ad revenue growing like a hockey stick (*).

* - Until the moment when the self-righteous mob declares you the next enemy of the people and raids your grain silos because they have been flinging shit at each other throughout the planting season.

"Both sidesism" is just as much of a problem, if not moreso.

And sensation seeking is more of a problem.

given that as per the article Democratic trust in the media fell after the election of Biden the explanation is if anything the opposite. The news media isn't partisan enough for the tastes of the audience.

This seems also intuitive to me given that the media despite obviously having its own biases depending on the paper appears significantly less polarized than the electorate. I find it interesting how many people default to blame the media rather than the consumers of news despite the question being entirely open if the issue is perception and expectation or media output itself.

I think the dominant narrative is also thrown into question by what people replace established media with. It's not like they're all signing up for the CS Monitor, but rather consumers appear to flock to pundits or online communities who are highly self-selected and cater specifically to particular groups and viewpoints.