The media demands trust. Its varying institutional defenses after criticism by President Trump come down to assertions of the importance of its role in providing checks and balances.
Let's forget about its descent from shameless bias to shameless propaganda for a moment. The media isn't just biased. It's increasingly incompetent and has little concern for the truth. The same lack of ethics that lead it to run Trump hit pieces with no evidentiary basis also apply across a spectrum of coverage.
That's how the Amelia Earhart picture became a story. It's why CNN went crazy over a lost airliner.
It's not just that the media is trustworthy except when it comes to Republicans. Lefties and other extremists think you can segregate ethics that way, but you can't. it bleeds over. And it's why the media is untrustworthy as an institution.
Period.
The media rushes out fake news for profit. Some of the fake news is targeted for political reasons. But it also has a profit motive. The media's job is to make money in a troubled industry. And it does this by catching "eyeballs" with viral stories.
Truth doesn't matter. The post-modern left dismisses the idea of truth as an invention of dead white males (who were probably racist too). Objectivity is a fallacy. Having dismantled any safeguards for their profession, all that's left is a fake news machine.