Even without validating beliefs, there are so many cases of news organizations publishing incorrect or misleading information in a rush to cover a story, only to then issue a silent correction weeks later when the damage has been done.
This weakens trust in two ways, first is just people who pay enough attention to notice the correction and gradually lose trust as they see how often that happens. The other is the more damaging, more common way, where someone has read the incorrect/misleading article and internalized the information only to find out much later that the information they internalized was incorrect (without ever seeing the original correction).
One example that comes to mind is regarding the supposed sudden Starlink outages in Ukraine back in October around when Musk was tweeting dumb stuff about appeasing Russia. CNN was quick to report the outage implying that it was unexpected by Ukraine and they were shutdown to blackmail the West into paying. This article was all over the news.
Then weeks later they put out an article stating that it was just 1300 terminals which were being provided by the UK which were shut-off due to the UK deciding not to pay for the subscription anymore, with Ukraine having been fully aware and having swapped them out beforehand with the other ~18000 still operating terminals. But this one got nowhere near the same traction and was still misleadingly headlined.
Think about it: broadcasting information costs something. Nobody is going to pay that cost unless they're getting a return for it. Nobody is going out of their way to provide you with information out of the goodness of their heart. They're doing it so that you buy what they're selling (e.g. pharmaceuticals, gold) or vote for their party, etc.
A lot of times that information will be technically not wrong, but that's not the goal.
Unless I am asking the taxi driver about traffic problem in their work area, or rider behavior, or...
We have become citizen journalists. We have to research our own news. I think that is not a bad thing.
I write journalist because if an establishment journalist can get away with single-sourcing something, why can't I?
YouTube is a cesspool of hot garbage, but there is also plenty of good information.
The key part in my opinion is to have the ability to collect, sift, confirm, and then make deduction.
Alas, we no longer teach fundamental thinking skills in schools.
Control this and you can control the world.
I think for the most part, people who take their news from youtube and random taxi drivers fall into the former category, whereas people who vote against the party/candidate recommended (overtly or covertly) by their local paper fall into the latter category. It's quite possible that a lot of people in the latter category would say they don't trust the news as part of a national opinion survey, but they wouldn't ever outright say to a stranger "oh, don't read the stuff printed in the City Courier, it's all lies". Particularly as the news is more and more national, but the political parties continue to attract around 50% of the vote each, I'd generally expect about 50% of the population to have at least this much distrust for at least some of the news.
You’ll quickly learn not to trust the news. Not because it’s wrong – it’s pretty factual for the most part – but because it keeps trying to make you care about the wrong things. Whipping up an emotional reaction to matters that don’t affect you. Ignoring large elephants in small rooms. Talking juuuust slightly past the core issue hoping you won’t notice.
Much of news, especially daily news, is like discussing the color of a bike shed instead of the core design problems of the reactor it sits behind. Because talking about the big stuff isn’t sexy and doesn’t get the clicks.
And even when you do find a source of boring news, you’ll find that most of it affects your life not one bit. It’s just entertainment to keep you busy. In the words of a quote I once heard and can never find again: ”The news doesn’t tell you what to think, it tells you what to think about”.
This is part of the reason I don't trust the news, because they all are focusing on the same things for a few weeks and then it drops never to be heard from again. Some examples
When Trump met with Kim Jong Un everything in the news media was about North Korea for weeks, it was painted as the vital question of our times that was a clear and present danger to democracy. 3 years into Biden I have barely heard anything about NK.
Another exmaple is oil prices, does anyone else remember during the Bush years how the oil prices dominated everything in the news and the Middle East was the most important region in the world, to the point that we supposedly went to war in Iraq over oil? Yet when it was hitting $5-6 a barrel I wasn't hearing anything about it. Or how many of us have heard anything on Iraq or Syria since ISIS?
You can look for countless examples but even if it isn't outright lying by choosing what to focus on the media already sets an agenda.
The easy angle is product placement [1]. Literally fork over a small sum of money and you get the news org to rave about your product without doing any verification.
There can be a huge discrepancy between what your experience is and what is being reported. Most people will tend believe what they see and know.