I feel there has been a major change in media around responsible and neutral reporting, media is neither anymore and they are rarely if ever accountable today.

When I was growing up, it was rare to see a media outlet be so one sided on any story or political party. I find it hard to find the facts anymore without having to do my own detailed research. That sucks because so many people won't do their own research and so just believe what the media has reported, and when you have researched facts it can be super frustrating dealing with people who haven't. It used to be you could trust the media to report a neutral position and show both sides of the story, but that is no longer the case.

Media has always reported on politics, but they never used to participate in them and they surely did not provide only one sided views (which happens on both sides). But even beyond politics, it used to be media would give you a balanced view of a story period, e.g. if there was a report of someone allegedly doing something, they'd research and give the person a fair chance to respond and they wouldn't ask questions in such a way the question itself was acting like a fact, instead they'd ask the question in a neutral way and let the viewer decide whether to believe the person. It is almost never a good idea to do media now if you are being unfairly accused of anything because you will almost never get a fair interview.

I think this partially went wrong when investigative reporting went too far, and then opinion reporting (which has always existed) became the mainstream reporting without the caveats of what it is. It pits people against each other instead of giving people facts to discuss together and work towards a solution.

I've personally experienced this biased reporting when I went to defend a non-profit I worked for in how we purchased equipment using donated funds. But because the reporting slant was already out that we wasted money they wouldn't listen to any facts. Their questions were, well how long have you been wasting this money? When did you learn that you had misused donated funds? WTF? How is that even neutral reporting? In this case, we had a replacement cycle of 5 years for our equipment, and spent ~$3,100 on each item whereas the people they were comparing us to had a replacement cycle of 1.2 years and spent ~$1,250 on each item. So we were actually using donated funds more efficiently, spending ~$3,100 instead of the ~$5000 we were being compared to. Now who was wasting donated funds? But since the story was already launched that we were wasting funds, we already had lost publicly, and as we tried to spend a little money proving our case, we got blasted for "wasting" funds on proving it. This type of reporting made us look bad (even when everyone around us knew we were in the right), and then the board mandated we move to the same purchase methodology, so we started spending MORE money for a product that was less than ideal for our use case. That way when we were compared the next time we were equal to the others we were being compared to. But that at least stopped the story from growing. That was when I said fuck it, I'm out, I just can't support that type of behavior.