It's not "American Media". It's "Media". The issue is worlwide.
I live in England. We have the BBC. BBC Radio Four news coverage is excellent, but even that is lousy when it comes to a lot of international news. The BBC World Service is better, for obvious reasons, and domestic BBC does make extensive use of their foreign correspondents. Just not so much in news bulletin coverage.
UK print media, especially newspapers, especially the lower end, is a cesspit of vile idiocy. I'm surprised there's no movie about it. It's disturbing how often the Daily Mail gets posted to HN.
National media is more or less fine. Local and state reporting has all but disappeared.
Reporting is awful everywhere and at any scale.
Media's job is no longer to spread information, but to create opinion. They're not mass informative media, they're mass propaganda tools.
That's why they lack quality: their goal is fulfilled even if their quality as informative media is very low.
I can recommend, despite the paywall, Michael Massing's 2009 piece, 'A New Horizon for News' on what happened to the US news business: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/sep/24/a-new-h...
As for the situation outside the US, I have close knowledge only of the UK (where there has been a decline in print news, but not comparable), and Germany (which is generally very healthy, not to say I can't complain about it at length). What I hear about print news reporting in France, Italy, and Japan is more positive than negative.
> Media's job is no longer to spread information, but to create opinion.
I think this is oversimplifying and rather cynical. Much TV news is like this, but much print reporting and some for-web reporting (Bloomberg, Reuters) is informational in intent. I don't particularly enjoy reading the New York Times, say, their attempt to render stories in accessible terms tends to rub me up the wrong way, but I admire the scope and ambition of their straight news reporting. And they bring a lot of news to light.
What's the alternative? What would the world be like if we only got the kind of news from Fox News and weblogs, and nothing from news teams like those of the NYT.
It would probably look a lot like news.google.com. I extensively customize my sources and I get a lot of Reuters, BBC, stuff like that. When I see infotainment articles, I filter it out at the source.