> And the other is trusted thought leaders who consult a variety of domain experts on a given topic to determine the consensus of the experts and relay it to all of the people who don't have time to look at the specific details on that specific topic. This is what has completely imploded. The news media has lost their credibility by explicitly abandoning even the pretense of impartiality and chasing clickbait nonsense for ratings, so nobody trusts them anymore. As it should be when they're publishing things like that.

I would argue that this assessment quite strongly examplifies the whole issue. I think that we have seen an unprecedented campaign to propagate the belief that the "mainstream media" is untrustworthy. And that campaign is very clearly politically motivated (funnily enough the most partisan of the big news networks portraits itself as the the upholder of truth, a misinformation campaign itself), and is very strongly based on misinformation and providing easy answers... Largely financed by an ideological opposition to government intervention and fueled by propaganda against global warming action