I can't personally speak to the quality of the news before I became aware of it around the 1990s or so as a teenager.

At the time, the New York Times was held up as the gleaming standard of the fourth estate. Sure, TV news was still television, but it did have some aspect of "trust". The anchors were "real (white) men with experience" in suits. With GRAVITAS.

These were my formative experiences of the decline of the fourth estate:

1) The New York Times shilling for the second Iraq war shamelessly, with no criticism of that Colin Powell con job. The NYT has never regained any credibility as an independent news source since then.

2) the rise of FoxNews, and eventually, MSNBC and all other crap.

3) Watching private equity buyouts of newspapers and consolidation of media empires with no pushback from regulatory agencies, and watching them collapse into insipid entertainment shows (Natalee Holloway). I remember some kinda-embarrassing news coming about that was immediately preempted by 24 hour coverage of Anna Nicole Smith's overdose. It seemed very suspicious how each and every news source blared constant coverage of that for days after:

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2007/02/anna-nicole-smi...

And it worked, I don't even remember what I thought was REALLY going on that disappeared from the headlines when she OD'd. I can't even find out to this day what conspiratorial undercurrent it covered up.

4) Al Gore getting mocked and grilled by the press in the 2000 election, while George Bush skated by with the aw shucks frat boy act. I'm not saying Al Gore was the greatest thing since sliced bread, but he was a global warming advocate at a time that we really needed a global warming advocate in power, even if the deadlock would have done nothing. Instead, we got George Bush. After the fact the media self-excused themselves because they were "angry that Billy Boy Clinton lied", even if true, is a shocking indictment of the US fourth estate.

IMO global warming is the long running litmus test of the failure of US media, especially compared to the EU media in my politically aware lifetime. Willfully ignored, downplayed, or mocked for 25 years, while the EU media would mention it constantly. This could kill hundreds of millions of people in the next century.

Next would be shameful oversight of the Iraq/Afghanistan forever war. Which killed possibly millions of people.

Then would be the unquestioning support of the forever war on drugs (imprisonment, racist enforcement, police empowerment, no treatment for addicts, and destroying of functioning Latin American governments as a result). Millions of lives ruined.

Finally, a complete lack of support for universal healthcare (which kills... millions of people).

Regardless, as information began to flow more freely from the internet, the fourth estate has responded by abandoning its morals and values. I'll say this for the Randolph Hearst era, as I read it there were lots of small muckraking newspapers that helped push the agenda of workers rights and workplace safety around the turn of the century.

I don't see anything like that coming out of the formally trained "fourth estate". They all just want big jobs and money from the zombie news conglomerates that control the oligarchical propaganda money.

In the end, the internet served mainly as a fine grained means for the shadow powers to test and determine how much they could get away with. In the "golden days" there was paranoia and fear of the truth. In the late 90s / aughts, they discovered how much lack of shame they could get away with. Now in the 2010s+, they have the tools of social media and mass fine-grained propaganda.

If you can't tell, I think the "fourth estate" is a mockery. Where once it may have served what they hold themselves up as, gleaming guardians of truth and light in the darkness, now they are the darkness. Journalists that work for any large media conglomerate are total sellouts. I suppose some of them tell themselves they "sneak in" the truth, maybe they can sleep at night with that.

Somehow my education involved a lot of "question authority" and "critical thinking". It was all public education (except college), and I had similar parents / adult figures, but I have heard that historically such education, even in America, was reserved for the rich or privileged. I did go to "rich" suburb public high school, so college prep was the emphasis, and that probably came along with it.

I would suspect if such education is more universal than my experience, it is actively under assault. I can't think of a better side effect of "teach to the test" than "we don't have time for critical thinking". Critical thinking is all that keeps one's head above water in the sea of manipulated "news".

If one takes the view that the destruction of the fourth estate is a brilliant means by the dark cabal of oligarchs to destroy the light of truth (and profit in the process, genius bastards), and that they've won, the next front is education and academia. Thus for-profit universities, funding manipulation, no child left behind, vouchers/charters, dropping funding of humanities, pricing it to oblivion, inflitrating an MBA management class to all universities, etc.

In reality, the smoke filled room of bellowing men isn't all that complicated. The US and World are seeing reduced competition and cartel/monopoly conditions is practically every "market". "Free Market Capitalism" iterative game theory results in local maxima stabilizations in cartels, once some market advantage is obtained and there is no protection from regulatory capture, dumping, cheap credit leverage, etc except another company of sufficient size.

The evil hooded cabal is winning.