I hear a lot of variations of "the media was never perfect", which is true in a strict sense, but dishonesty comes in degrees and that's what we're debating. In particular, while I did grow up with the media cheerleading the Iraq War, mostly that was just citing "intelligence sources". Now the media overtly lies about the contents of publicly available content (e.g., the Damore "Google Memo" or the Covington Catholic video) or it has a journalist wearing a gas mask standing in front of a burning police station with a "Mostly Peaceful Protest" caption underneath.

Maybe my formative years were part of a relative anomaly in journalistic history--maybe journalists were always ideologically homogeneous propagandists and the last decade is naught but a return to form. In whichever case I know from experience it doesn't have to be that way and I emphatically reject the backslide.