No, it's not. At least not if you're counting the old papers as traditional.

If you're counting cable news companies as traditional, you're probably 30 or younger and don't remember when news companies actually did research and had editors that fact-checked.

For as long as I can remember, news television has been a total joke. There's Democratic News and Republican News and both are obvious liars. I never read newspapers so I don't know if those are any better but I imagine not.

Instructive is the smear campaign against SMTP Creator and IANA head Jon Postel by anonymous "senior government officials" in the months before his death. It was a classic government smear campaign, against someone who did so much, for such low pay, to get the Internet working. He was repaid by the government hounding him in the months before his death. Thankfully John Gilmore held up the torch on all the shady deals going on after he died, even though not much was done.