The public's trust in journalism has cratered because they became activists instead of journalists. It's fascinating and telling that the article avoids this issue completely, not mentioning trust once.
It is mistaken to think that the choices are only Fox News or CNN(or equivalent), the other (seemingly growing) choice is no news at all.
I go the no news at all route these days. We live in an age of cheap, effective, easy to create misinformation.
Journalists were always activists in some sense. You need to have a strong moral sense to uncover truths that power wants to keep under wraps, you need to have a strong inner motivation to seek out information that can get you or loved ones harassed or even harmed.
Trust has eroded because the business model for journalism has eroded, with a lack of money the news had to look into tapping other sources of income like pay-per-click ads, to increase that you need to have clickbait, ragebait, all kinds of manipulation to make someone choose to visit your news site instead of the 100s of others that popped up on the internet. With that you start losing trust.
Also I believe your view of journalism is very likely an American one, with your 24/7 "News" channels that are more a drama-generating machine than actual reporting, or investigative journalism.
There's still a lot of good journalism being done, and nowadays a lot outside of the usual institutions of news where investigations could be done before but got eroded because they got poorer.
Journalism necessarily requires some level of engagement and activism, I just don't think what you mean by "activist" is the actual meaning of the word but a catch-all umbrella for stuff you don't like. Would love to be proved wrong though.
The worst is the opposite people with an agenda who extract the one counterpoint to a 500 page research paper and write an article about how the whole papaer validate their assumptions
But somewhere in the middle is the boring boilerplate overview that takes no real stance at all.
Did customers lose trust because of activism?
Or did customers just switch to untrustable (but free) online papers, leaving activism as the only way to earn a living for former upright journalists?
What are the signs and effects of this activist media? Who are its players? Are there sides? What are they?
In general I have trouble believing it’s the medias fault though, not that they’re without sin, I just think the forces that make something like this are bigger than the media.
It certainly was re: journalism.
When we only had the big three TV networks vying for our eyeballs, they each used news as a way to attract the broadest set of Americans. The nightly news was a loss leader, in the hopes that we'd watch the rest of the evening's programming/ads on that network.
The "unbiased" business didn't really exist until someone could be in all of our homes building rapport with our families every night. And cable, then more so the web, completely disrupted that.
There used to be many, many more newspapers, with room for distinction as the paper of record for any given demographic. Radio, then more so TV, put an end to most of those.
It was always a mystery if the activism was top-down mandated, i.e., journalists were forced to be activists by their management or not.
So it would be interesting to see who was fired. Mainstream has gotten saner in the U.S., with many heretical articles in the NYT and WaPo at least on the war topics.
This is not the case in the U.K. or Germany, where only one public opinion is allowed.