This country used to have multiple independent presses. Most cities had more than one newspaper and if they were aligned with one poltical party or the other they plainly included that in the name of the paper.
Now, the vast majority of the media (not only news, but publishing and entertainment as well) in the country is controlled by six companies: Comcast, Disney, National Amusements, News Corp, TImeWarner, and Sony.
Let it sink in, whereas there used to be multiple independent sources of news and entertainment available to everyone, now six companies control an incredibly large swatch of news and entertainment. The problem is not so much that they are individually biased--the fact is that anytime power is so concentrated bias will be inevitable. These are massive conglomerates, some of them raking in cash from movies and such made decades ago. News outlets can operate at a loss--what do they care? The CEO's of these companies are worth billions in some cases. They suffer from billionaires: they conclude that since they were clever enough to make billions of dollars, they ought to be put in charge of molding society in their glorious image. The Declaration of Independence said that people should be free to pursue their own happiness. It did not say that people were to be the raw material for oligarchs to mold and form for their happiness.
The dangers of the media were well laid out decades ago when Alexander Solzhenitsyn addressed the graduates of Harvard University in 1978. Sure, the media can watchdog the country, but who is watching the media?
The press too, of course, enoys the widest freedom...But what sort of use does it make use of this freedom?...Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic disease of the 20th century and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press...One gradually discovers a common trend of preferences within the Western press as a whole. It is a fashion; there are generally accepted patterns of judgment; there may be common corporate interests, the sum effect being not competition but unification. - Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 1978
The internet has, in many ways, made the news media worse, not better. Used to, newspaper reports and such had at least several hours to figure out what was behind a story. Now, 24 hour news channels and internet outlets have minutes. Used to, there had to be some semblance of balance as no outlet could really afford to alienate half the viewers. Now, with multiple outlets they can, and do. And now that news organizations are but a small part of media empires, they can afford to operate at a loss. It is a race to the extreme. Journalism has moved from reporting to advocacy. It is not a case of reporting what happened, but rather pushing a narrative. A narrative is a story that supports an ideology. If some percentage of the facts support the narrative, well, good enough. Narrative is a fancy word for a lie. And any narrative-based journalisim is an editorial disguised as reporting.
The so-called Fact Checking would be hilarious if so many people did not fall for it. If a journalist throws that sacred incantation in front of a thinly-veiled editorial, one must believe it! Because the journalist started off their editorial with those magic words. If there are facts and logic to support or disprove a story, then spit it out. Soon mere fact checks will not be enough. We will have a Double Fact Check, then a Double-Dog Fact Check, and finally a Triple Fact Check.
And at what point does the medium become the message with internet news? In business there is a saying that there is no reason to routinely generate a report if no action will be taken after reviewing said report. Well, what actions would you take if you checked the news every hour or only once a week? Any? It is not a good idea to bury one's head in the sand, but will it really change anything you actually do if you find out about the latest news story the next hour or the next day? Or even a week later? People used to do just fine getting the news once a day in the daily paper, or even just once a week. In depth, insightful reports were delivered perhaps monthly in news magazines. Being practically force-fed news blurbs and headlines everywhere, what is that doing to us?
More than once I have heard people say "The headline said one thing, but I read the whole article that was not happened at all!" News headlines themselves are editorials, and even if a person knows the media is biased, just the headlines shoved at people non-stop has an impact. So turn them off. It is said that both presumption and dispair are sins, and that seems to be just what the media is pushing.
"But I have to respond in the comment box to make a difference?" Oh really, a difference in who? Really think you will change someone's mind? Very unlikely. More likely being a com-box commando will waste hours and days and even weeks of your life every year, time that would be better spent on something else. If you want to make a difference by changing someone's mind, talk to people you know. As someone who spent hours on usenet in the early 1990's, trust me, in the end it was all a waste of time.
Alternate Media Sources (None of these are necessarily endorsed by this site, but are a sample of what alternates are out there.)