Yellow Journalism has been around since the 1890s, and to a degree journalism has always been about propaganda - it's hard to spread your opinion without a printing press, and by the time the poor can get their hands on them, the upper classes/wealthy/capital holders have had access to this level of automation for some time/captured huge chunks of the market.

In a way, it is a bit of an oddity that there has been trust in journalism in recent decades - some individual acts like publishing whistleblower accounts or corruption have lead to an outsized perception of it being for the public good.

Meanwhile, we have seen again and again - particularly in Murdoch owned properties - that the interests of commercial media do not align with what we consider the common good; ie

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_controversies

Yet we do nothing about it in particular (Australia and the US). Then we end up back here, wondering why groups in the electorate have wildly different perceptions